


Eye Eater

by sam_roulette



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (The Archivist and Head Archivist aren't necessarily the same thing), Alternate Universe - Dragons, Archivist Sasha James, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Slow Burn, Wishes, fine dining but the joke is the fine dining is literally eating statements, it hurts and doesnt feel like a fix it at some points but i swear to God it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:48:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25197976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sam_roulette/pseuds/sam_roulette
Summary: When Sasha opened the door and saw the dragon Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, eating a calliope, one would have to forgive her for being thrown off guard.In which Sasha has a mountain of mysteries to solve and a dragon Jon eats every horrifying thing in the Eye's catalog.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 44
Kudos: 224





	1. Cronching the Calliope

**Author's Note:**

> Very loosely inspired by the LiEat: Tales of a Lie-Eating Dragon games, and then it went fully off the rails from there
> 
> Come find/yell at us on tumblr @sam-roulette! :)

Really, Sasha hadn’t known what exactly she expected when she took the police reports for the Harold Silvana case under one arm and stepped into Jon’s office for the first time. Perhaps a hint of his draconic traits slipping out of hiding; an errant wing draped over the seat, a hint of cat-like shine to the eyes. Maybe just her new dragon boss, using esoteric dragon magic to appear entirely human-ish, sitting prim and proper behind his desk, eyes raking over paper. Definitely something less weird than artefact storage.

When Sasha opened the door and saw the dragon Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, eating a calliope, one would have to forgive her for being thrown off guard.

It wasn’t even an exaggeration or anything. It was a full-sized steam organ, painted a red that seemed not quite as vibrant as it should have been in the somewhat bright light of the office, with a broken chain glittering on top of a picked lock. And the dragon, appearing mostly human except for a few  _ key bits, _ was eating it.

Sasha stood in the doorway, not even allowed a moment to process before the man in front of her glanced up, vaguely annoyed by her intrusion. When he spoke, his teeth were wickedly sharp and far more numerous than they should have been- had to be, to be chewing up all that metal without it seeming to hurt. “... and you are?”

“...” Sasha didn’t respond for a moment, taking some time to process the sight in front of her. She held the files to her chest and discreetly pinched the inside of her arm to get back into action, not really keen on annoying someone with quite so many fangs. “My name is Sasha James- one of the new assistants? Sorry for the interruption, Mister Sims,” 

“Just Jon is fine,” Jon sat up straighter, covering his mouth behind a clawed hand for a moment. When he uncovered it, the teeth were different, mostly human-looking and blunt. Sasha might have taken the previous sight for a hallucination, if not for the fact that Jon had two extra canines on the left side of his mouth. “Wright sent you early.” 

Sasha’s brow furrowed at the mention of the Artefact Storage head. “... Adrian didn’t have anything to do with my reassignment?”

“No, not that Wright- but I suppose you wouldn’t know,” Jon seemed entirely displeased with this fact, but made no move to tell her who exactly the other Wright was, instead moving on, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss James- but you... caught me at a somewhat inopportune time.” 

“Rosie said to run these down to you,” Sasha held up the police reports, and Jon’s gaze snapped to them. The gleam in his eye was hungry. “She said you were on… lunch.”

Jon said somewhat peevishly, “I am.”

“... so… you’re really eating...?” Sasha asked despite herself.

Jon looked at her for a long moment. His gaze diverted down to the now opened calliope, at the bit of metal in his other hand that was half carved with “-ange mus-” on its surface, sporting a healthy bite mark. He fixed Sasha with a long-suffering look. “Yes. I believe this was just established.”

“Right, right- well,” Sasha gingerly rounded around the instrument being taken apart and set the files on Jon’s desk, besides a mundane cup of pens and an even more innocuous candy jar full of white… jawbreakers. Something white and shiny at first glance at least. “Shall I wait out in the commons while you finish?”

“That would be appreciated, yes,” Jon gently huffed out a little breath. “There are to be two others joining you shortly- you may take that time to get to know one another, as I suspect I’ll be here for a little while yet.” He eyed the calliope somewhat balefully, tracing the tip of a claw disdainfully along the jagged top edge and making an indent. 

“Because you’re eating the calliope,” Sasha said.

“Because I’m eating the calliope,” Jon confirmed.

“Hm… always thought it was pronounced callie-opee.” Sasha commented, because really, what else could someone in her position do besides just carry on as normal? “Not ‘cal-eye-oh-pee’,”

“Ah?” Jon blinked a bit, somewhat taken aback. “Well- I’ve also heard it said as “callie-ope”.” 

Sasha laughed a little, eyebrows raising. “Really? By who?”

“Americans.”

“Ah. That explains that then,” Sasha said, shaking her head. 

“Indeed,” The corner of Jon’s lips tilted up for a moment before he shook his head. “In any case, I hope you weren’t too… affected by this. Or that the others will be. I generally have to… dispose of any cursed items that make their way down here.”

“I see- and I’m fine,” Sasha assured him, moving back towards the door. She supposed this was just part of whatever Jon had been wished for- curse-eating was certainly one of the more esoteric magics that she’d heard of, but she was sure there were stranger ones. “And I’m sure the other ones will be as well if you explain. Communication is important.”

“Quite right,” Jon said, sharpened teeth sliding back into place in his mouth. Sasha heard this rather than saw it, stubbornly staring at the calliope. “Sasha, right?”

“Yes, that’s me,”

“There’s tea in the breakroom.” He nodded, and then, with a strength that his thin arms didn’t seem capable of holding, he began to tear the lid off of the calliope. Sasha decided not to question why there was the muffled sound of screaming.

“Thank you- I look forward to working with you!” Sasha smiled professionally as she left the room.

Alright. Sasha figured this should probably have invoked some kind of minor crisis, what with seeing her new dragon boss methodically take apart and eat a calliope with abnormally long talons; but the only thought in her head was,  _ Well, it’s not Artefact Storage. _

* * *

“So like,” Sasha paused in her tea making, looking towards the door to see who was speaking, “that interview was  _ weird,  _ right?”

Tim was the first one of the two apparent mystery assistants to arrive, which was more than a pleasant surprise for Sasha. She grinned a bit, putting the lid on the electric kettle.  _ “God,  _ yes. Tea?”

She’d known Tim had been asked about the position, of course; before she sent her application to be transferred out of Artefact Storage to literally anywhere else, they’d gossipped a bit about it over Sasha gingerly taking a very cursed clock hand off of Tim’s hands. He’d said he was looking forward to something a little more exciting, or something to that effect.

Thinking back on the dragon eating approximately forty kilograms of solid metal and who even knew what else, Sasha thought bemusedly that at least Tim would get what he wished for.

“So I don’t know if it’s because I was scouted for the position instead of like, applying myself, but,” Tim said, settling at one of the chairs around the fairly small, albeit rather nice quality, table in the room, “is it me or did Elias have some weird shit to say about the job?”

Sasha turned to face him, leaning against the counter, “I mean, he more or less told me during my interview that if I could,” here she made air quotes, lowering her voice to imitate the man of the gossip hour, “‘Keep the organizational system of the archives from falling too hard into draconic tendencies’, that would be an excellent way to ‘show my service’. As if I’m coming down to a bleeding war zone!”

Tim rolled his eyes so hard that Sasha swore she could see some of his eye socket twisting alongside it, “Great- specist to boot! Damn well figures for someone as squirrely as that,”

“Might go a tad bit beyond specist,” Sasha said, shaking her head with some incredulity, “Elias may well have advocated for murder,”

Tim’s jaw dropped. “Oh, you are  _ lying,” _

“Nope,” Sasha popped the p, shaking her head again. It was still as baffling as the first time she’d heard it. “He had quite a bit to say about how lucrative the position was, and how he’d have replaced Sims if he’d been able to- a little bit more to say about the apparent archives dragon keeping dangerous secrets, and having dangerous assets,” It was her turn to roll her eyes, “You genuinely couldn’t be more obvious if you tried,”

“That slimy little bastard? Being obvious?” Tim’s eyebrows raised, huffing out a laugh, “Now this, I have to see- jackass was all about how ‘being cautious of rumor’ and ‘not allowing one’s feelings get in the way’ to me,”

“Has to make you wonder why he’d go through all the trouble to say anything about it at all, in that case,” Sasha mused, “if he can’t even keep his warnings straight.” 

“Did he say anything more incriminating? Like, I don’t know, ‘please slay the dragon for me’?” Tim asked, sprawling back a bit more in his seat.

“Elias did not say the literal words, ‘please kill Jonathan Sims’, no,” Sasha said, “but he did go into great detail-slash-extremely vague description about how if anything truly  _ scandalous  _ occurred, it would be difficult to file criminal charges against anyone here,”

Tim shook his head in turn, just as amazed as Sasha was, “... Is it even legal to insinuate that murdering your new boss is okay?”

“On some planes of existence, maybe so,” Sasha said, moving to grab another mug as the kettle whistled. Most of the small army of mugs in the cabinet were fairly uniform white things, sometimes with a cheerful ‘good morning!’ or ‘coffee’ labeling its surface, but there were also several novelty mugs hidden toward the back without much rhyme or reason. She didn’t even know they  _ had  _ My Chemical Romance brand coffee mugs. “Probably has all sorts of paperwork attached. Who wants to deal with attempted assassination of employees?”

“I’ve got it! He wants the assassination  _ because  _ of the paperwork involved,” Tim said, tapping his palm on the table, “Elias’s bureaucracy kink strikes again,” 

Sasha burst out into giggles, quickly setting the tea kettle down and covering her mouth. “Wow! You’re just as terrible as ever, I see,”

“I like to think of it more as being ‘unbearably witty’, myself,”

“As if speculating on any kinks Elias might have isn’t some kind of psychological torture,”

“Well maybe that’s my kink? Ever thought of that?” Tim said disingenuously, leaning further back and balancing his chair on its hind legs.

“Like being choked and kink hypotheticals are what get you going,” Sasha snorted.

“As insensitive as always, Miss James,” Tim said with faux disappointment. 

“Get better taste.” 

“Oh, you  _ wound  _ me-”

“Er…” Their good-natured banter was interrupted when a third voice, mildly timid and unsure of its own interruption, interrupted, “... Is this where we’ll be meeting the Head Archivist, or…”

There was a man poking his head into the room, seeming incredibly nervous- and possibly not just because he’d caught Tim and Sasha flirting a little. The stranger wore wire glasses sliding down a bit from where they were perched on a round nose and the kind of face that incited protective instincts in people. Tim, who seemed immediately and incredibly interested, was the one to say, “Yeah, that’ll be here- I’m guessing you’re the other one getting tossed to the sharks?”

The man seemed slightly alarmed. “I-I thought it was a dragon?”

Tim snorted, “And he’s got a sense of humour too!” He pushed himself up from his seat languidly, crossing the room in a remarkable amount of time, holding a hand out, “Name’s Tim Stoker, formerly research, newly minted chew toy,”

“Ah, Blackwood. Martin, Blackwood- from the library?” The newcomer introduced himself, gingerly taking Tim’s hand and shaking it. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Bit nervous about the position then?” In a smooth motion, Tim managed to wrap an arm around Martin’s shoulder, gauge that the contact was a bit much, and switched to patting his shoulder instead, pulling his arm away to put some distance between them. Tim nudged him back towards the table. “Doesn’t seem to be too hard, from what I’m getting- it’s just archiving business and reorganization,”

“True,” Martin said, sitting down and glancing toward Sasha curiously. Sasha gave a tiny wave, wiggling her fingers. “It’s also, meeting our new boss? He apparently has… a reputation,”

“I’m sure Elias was just saying nonsense in the interviews,” Sasha said, carrying the mugs for herself and Tim over. She set them down and held out her hand for a shake as well, “Sasha James. Would you like some tea?” 

Martin’s grip on her hand was gentle but surprisingly firm. He smiled a bit sheepishly, “Er, yes- but I can go ahead and make it, if you’re already done!”

“Nonsense- I’m still standing, aren’t I?” Sasha said, moving back toward the counter. “How strong do you take it?” 

“Fairly strong, thank you,” Martin said, folding his hands in front of him, “And, ah, where did you get reassigned from…?”

“Artefact Storage- I actually applied for the position here,” Sasha said, beginning to pour the hot water.

“Unlike us unwilling sacrifices, Miss James likes to toss herself headfirst into danger,” Tim said gravely. 

“You’re lucky I’m making a good first impression on Mister Blackwood here,” Sasha said cheerfully, “or else I would have thrown this tea box at you,”

Tim gasped, mock offended, “And so violent too!”

Martin chuckled a little, a shy smile on his face. “Well, in any case, just Martin is fine. If you were in Artefact Storage, I suppose that means you haven’t heard the, uh, rumors? About the Archives?”

“Can’t say I have,” Sasha said, bringing the third mug over. What with the massive turn over rate of Artefact Storage and Sasha attempting to do such minor things as survive, there hadn’t been much time for gossip. But at least the job had fantastic life insurance. 

“Oooh, gossip hour!” Tim perked up, “Spill that tea, Martin; snatch a wig if you’re feeling lucky,” 

Sasha had to keep herself from physically recoiling, especially since she knew Tim was misusing words to cause the most psychic damage possible to her specifically. “Tim, as of now, I don’t know you,”

“Come on now- don’t be a stranger to me here!” Tim pouted, “Especially on our first team-building exercise.”

“Not much of a team if your chattering isn’t letting Martin speak,” Sasha ribbed, nodding to Martin to cede the floor to him. 

Martin’s smile grew a bit as he seemed to become at least a bit at ease. “Well, there’ve been a lot of rumors circulating ‘round the library- apparently, sometimes people passing by the stairwell to the Archives will hear… screaming. Screaming, the sounds of tearing metal, or tearing paper or concrete or even explosives seconds from going off- but if anyone goes down, it’s just a mostly empty Archives, with Jonathan Sims in the middle of it.”

“Spooky,” Tim commented, leaning forward.

Martin’s smile slipped a little, pausing to sip his tea. “That, and… All the archival assistants, that used to be here… either ran or died, before Elias let Gertrude go. People seem to think the dragon down here might have… scared them off.”

That gave Sasha pause, even more so than the bit about mysterious noises in the Archives. She’d known about Gertrude leaving the job and recommending Jonathan Sims for the Head Archivist position, but as far as she’d known, Jon had been Gertrude’s only assistant. “How many?” 

“Something like five of them? Maybe six,” Martin said, “There was a dragon that used to hang around the Archives, too- not Jon, but some other dragon. I think one of the assistants left, and then one of them died due to surgery complications, and another one ran away to... Russia, or something of the like?”

“Damn,” Tim whistled lowly, leaning back in his seat, “That is… a lot that Elias didn’t mention to me. Did he mention anything to you, Sash?”

“No, not at all,” Sasha shook her head, “Though, I thought Gertrude left willingly? Elias had mentioned that there was some disagreement over the running of the Archives,”

Martin frowned a bit. “Elias didn’t mention anything like that to me…”

“Suppose he just forgot?” Tim suggested.

“Hm… seems like an important detail to just ‘forget’,” Sasha said, eyebrows furrowing as she tapped the edge of her mug. It was already odd that Elias would go so far as insinuate that the Head Archivist position should be opened for ‘new blood’- it was another thing entirely to selectively disseminate seemingly benign information. And with Jon apparently being at the center of some nasty rumors…

“I-I mean, I wouldn’t put too much stock in it, personally,” Martin tried to say, smiling a bit as he tried to bring up the mood. “Some of the older librarians seemed to have nice things to say about Mister Sims, and! I know at least one of those ‘running’ assistants left before Sims had even been an assistant here.”

“Well, that’s true,” Sasha said, ignoring how Tim glanced at her questioningly, “People will make up rumors about just about anything- and besides, I’m sure we’ll find out the sort of person he is soon enough,” 

“The kind of dragon, too,” Tim said. 

“I mean, at- well, someone said he was funny!” Martin said cheerily, rubbing the back of his neck, “So we have that to look forward to, right?”

Sasha, remembering Jon eating an entire calliope with his bare hands, barely suppressed a chortle as she said, “Yeah, at least we have that- so, how was working in the library, other than the rumor mill?”

They spent a bit chatting over tea, and Sasha got to know a little more about Martin. He seemed like a nice enough bloke, trustworthy and sturdy in a pinch, but perhaps not someone she could confide in just yet about her budding interest in the sinister underbelly of these Archives. 

About half an hour later, the dragon of the hour finally stepped into the communal kitchen, smoothing out his long skirt. His clothes were pristine, despite his grizzly meal, and this time when he opened his mouth to speak, he had the human number of teeth, “Apologies for being somewhat late in greeting you all- I lost track of time,”

Beside both of them, Martin blinked, lips parting before he quickly looked down at the wood of the table, finding his third cup of tea very interesting suddenly. Sasha sipped her second cup of tea and sat back to watch as Tim, critically attuned to starting conversations, glanced at their dragon boss, and immediately misidentified him. “Oh, hey there! Didn’t know Elias was sending another assistant down- where are you hailing from, stranger?”

Jon’s lips twitched into a frown, “I’m not ‘hailing’ from anywhere- you’re going to be working for me,” 

Martin gently choked on his drink as Tim barked out a little laugh. “Damn! How does Elias keep finding the funny ones?” Sasha gently patted Martin’s back as she watched the clown act unfold, “Seriously, where  _ did  _ he find you? I thought I knew everyone down in research, and Sasha would’ve mentioned ya if you were Artefact Storage,”

“My name is Jonathan Sims,” Jon said, seeming more annoyed as the moments passed. “I’m  _ actually  _ your boss.” Instead of doing something dramatic like unveiling his teeth or showing off his horns or something Sasha expected, he fished around in the pocket of his vest, pulling out his wallet. He strode over to the table and slid it across, showing his ID. 

Tim’s laughter died down suddenly as he blinked down at the rectangle of plastic caught up in leather, processing. Sasha smiled brightly and asked Jon, “So, how was lunch?” 

Jon glanced at her, still frowning as he dourly said, “Metallic.” He picked the wallet back up, “Any more… doubts about my identity?”

Tim slowly looked at her, and she could see the exact moment in his eyes when it clicked that Sasha had known. Contrary to popular belief, betrayal could be something to be savored. Tim was just too easy to tease sometimes. He turned back to Jon, smiling apologetically. “Sorry, sorry- it’s just… you didn’t look like how Elias described you?” Elias had described Jon as appearing to be ‘somewhat of a terror’. Jon may have been a little taller than most humans, but he was also stick thin and looked rather like he raided Sasha’s grandmother’s wardrobe. He was even wearing gold glasses retainers, which was the most unthreatening accessory Sasha had ever seen in her life. “No teeth, and the like,” 

Another thing to file away. Elias hadn’t mentioned the teeth to Sasha- Sasha had to discover that on her own. 

“Well, that explains it then,” Jon said, contempt dripping off of his voice. “You’ll find that Elias has a small tendency to misrepresent a few things. If I might ask, what has he told you about your position as Archival Assistants?”

“He-!” Martin started, looking up at Jon, “Elias said that we’d be following up on statements made to the Institute, some minor fieldwork, paperwork, and organizing the Archives. Said two hundred years worth of statements were in disarray,”

“Correct,” Jon said. Martin perked up at that, smiling, “Except for the last point.” Martin wilted a tad. “I worked with Gertrude as her assistant for the better part of two decades, both officially and unofficially, and received my Library Sciences degree from Oxford in 2010. I can say with certainty that Miss Robinson’s system needs no further revision. In addition to the correctly stated duties, however, you will be finding statements that have not been marked audio-accessible and record them for ease of accessibility.”

“That’s a bit of a relief then,” said Tim, who was always glad to have less work. “So, how does organization in the Archives work, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“If you have any statements that refuse to record digitally, you’ll hand them to me,” Jon said, “and for the rest of the statements that do record, just place them on your desks and I’ll get to them at the end of the day for filing.”

“That’s really helpful- but I mean,” Tim said, “how do we find previous statements if we need to cross-reference? Do you have any records of known documents, or would that all be digitized already?”

“Just ask me,” Jon said, “I’ll know where to find them.”

“... Yes, but,” Tim’s smile was becoming a bit more strained, “if you’re busy, and we can’t get them from you, how- how exactly will we find them? Are they labeled by date, time, or…”

“The base system is the last three digits of the year, then the day, then the month, but Gertrude and I devised a few revisions on that over the last two years. It’s a rather intuitive system, so you’ll have to just figure it out as you go along.” Jon seemed to bite the inside of his cheek. Sasha hoped for his sake that it was with the human jaws.

“So… what were those revisions? Could you please explain those?”

“No.” 

Sasha decided to say something, because at this point it was obvious that Sims wasn’t going to explain much further and this was akin to pulling teeth, “So I’m guessing you have a knack for finding things as your skillset?”

“That is… part of it,” Jon said, “The other part of it is that I eat the statements.”

There was a brief pause where that sentence sunk in. 

“As in- the paper itself?” Tim asked, eyebrows furrowing as he tried to understand, “Or…”

“Sometimes eating paper is involved,” Jon said as if that didn’t just raise more questions. “It’s more of a… metaphysical sense. It’s to do with my magic, so it would be best to… let you see as we go along, rather than explain, I believe.”

“Ah! I see. That’s interesting.” Sasha said, “So would we be getting a demonstration, or-”

“I would rather wait on that,” Jon said, lips pressing together in a thin line, “if only because I’d need to find an… appropriate statement to use. I’m afraid that what I eat can be a little more… disconcerting, than just paper or the odd calliope.” He pronounced it correctly this time, leaving Sasha to smile a bit. “It would be a lot to show on the first day.”

“Calliope?” Martin asked, blinking owlishly, “As in… as in, one of those piano-type things?”

“It was more of an organ, really,” Sasha said idly.

Tim glanced at her, eyes widening, “Wait, you already saw him  _ eat a calliope?  _ Why didn’t you tell me??”

“For the dramatic irony,” Sasha said, batting her eyelashes at him.

“As for your work,” Jon said as their little diversion winded down, frowning lightly, “You’re free to begin. Though before I go, I do have to tell you that you three are currently in a probationary period. It wasn’t my… preference, to be given assistants so soon after Gertrude…” He paused, sighed, and went back into it, “As such, I need to be sure that you all work well together and can maintain composure in the… unique workplace expectations of the Archives. After I see if you three are well-suited to it and trustworthy, I will explain further about the filing system… among other things.”

Martin cautiously raised his hand, and Jon nodded to him. He cleared his throat before speaking, tone wobbling just the slightest bit, “A-And… if we aren’t, suited?”

“Then I’ll have no choice but to… ‘fire’ you,” Jon said.

“... Why did you hesitate before saying you’d fire us.” Sasha asked. 

“Because you aren’t able to quit and I’m not allowed to fire you normally,” Jon said as if that wasn’t absolutely unhinged. “I’ll explain how the ‘firing’ process works at the end of these next few weeks. In the meantime, if you try to quit… you’ll see exactly what I mean.” With that, and with no further explanation, he turned and started walking. Jon only paused at the door to say, “The first round of statements is already at your desks.” And then he was gone.

The trio of new assistants waited until his footsteps retreated before glancing at one another. There was an uncomfortably long silence before Martin, chuckling nervously, said, “Aha… well, Diana always had a- a morbid sense of humor.”

“Were we… just threatened,” Tim said, smile finally dropping as he stared at the doorway in disbelief, “or did the raging headache just make me hallucinate our new boss saying we weren’t allowed to quit?”

Sasha looked thoughtfully at the door, turning the words over in her mind. They ‘weren’t able’ to quit, was the exact wording… and it, oddly enough, didn’t sound like a threat. It just sounded like certainty. 

“... You know… I’m not actually sure.”

* * *

“Hey, Sash, have a look at this!” 

Sasha glanced up from the mound of looseleaf papers she was stapling, finding Tim hunched over a box in the corner. If this were any self-respecting horror story, this would have been the point where Sasha (who was, of course, the final girl trope in all its glory) would slowly approach with a makeshift weapon in hand, waiting to see the blood-soaked face of what once had been her friend creak towards her. This was not a self-respecting horror story. This was real life and she was stapling.

“I thought I told you to get more staples?” Sasha said disapprovingly as she moved to peer over Tim’s shoulder, stapler still held in one hand like a weapon. 

“I am, I am- but look what I found in the back of the closet!” Tim held up the most jarringly overcolored t-shirt Sasha had ever seen, taking a moment to cough his lungs out as some dust caught in it was shaken loose. It had  _ I eat statements when no one is looking,  _ printed on the front in enormous comic sans. Even more bafflingly, it seemed to be child-sized.

Sasha wrinkled her nose, just barely suppressing a coughing fit of her own, “Why was this in the closet?” 

“Hell if I know!” Tim cheerfully said, “There are so many extra closets in these halls that, well, who knows what’s around here! Wouldn’t be surprised if we found someone’s bones,”

“Don’t even jinx that,” Sasha huffed out a little laugh, tilting her head. “This really  _ is  _ hideous though, oh my God,”

“Right?!” Tim grinned, “God, this is great. Maybe next time we’ll find one that’s actually in Jon’s size!” 

“Maybe- and if you have time to do that,” Sasha said, nudging Tim with her foot, “you have time to head to Jon’s office and ask about if we should order more staples,”

Tim craned his neck to look up at her, groaning a bit, “Aw, what? Here I am, making important archaeological finds- diving deep into this travesty of an organizational nightmare- and I get dragon duty on top of it? I’ll be dead before I can even get a word out!”

Sasha rolled her eyes, “Oh, hush, you big baby- you can still play archives archaeologist when you get back. But we need staples, and need I remind you that this  _ is  _ our first day of apparent probation?”

Tim groaned louder, head sagging forward, “You’re right, but that doesn’t mean I like it. He’s already making this job… way more of a headache than it should be. Makes you wonder how he ended up being promoted,”

“There’s a lot of things I’m wondering about here, truth be told,” Sasha crouched down to where Tim was sat on his knees on the tile. Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said, “Like Gertrude, or why this filing system is… like this.”

Tim smiled, something tinged with some humor, “So we have Detective James on the case for real then? And here I was half afraid you were just going to let this pass you by!”

“You know I can’t just sit low with a good mystery on my hands,” Sasha winked, “and that means having a trusted confidant… a man on the inside… a good partner,”

“Oh?” Tim uttered, turning to face her with an interested gleam in his eye.

“Oh, yes,” Sasha said coyly, “and I’ll need someone incredibly intelligent, supremely charming, and perfectly suited to trickery to help me dig into the places where Sims may not want me to dig,” 

“Now, I wonder where you can find someone like that…” Tim said, raising a hand to his chin to think. Sasha stifled a laugh. “Martin’s still fairly new, and your connections in Artefact Storage may not… well, there’s always research-”

“I meant  _ you,  _ you silly man,” Sasha said laughingly.

Tim’s head snapped up as he said, “You did?” He blinked, then ran a hand through his hair, grinning even with a light dusting of pink on his cheeks, “I mean, of course you meant me- I was just about to offer myself up, y’know,” He waggled his eyebrows. "And I don't know anyone who's passed the opportunity yet,"

“Hah! Well, here’s your chance to start on that,” Sasha nudged him again, smiling, “Just go ahead and ask for the staples, see if he tells you his nefarious plots, and when you come back we can start on the real investigation!” 

“Ah, damn,” He snapped, “Can’t argue with that logic! You’re the boss, and you know I trust you enough that this isn’t just something to make me ask for the staples,  _ right,  _ Sasha?”

“Of course not- I was gonna see if I could find some stuff on him later, and there’s always the matter of distracting him away from his computer, and…” Sasha did have a lot she wanted to look into- but on another day. This was still the first day, and she wanted to at least establish herself as a hard worker first.

“Alright- be back quicker than two strokes of your hacker keys!” Tim saluted, hopping up.

Sasha called after him, “That’s not nearly as reassuring as you think,” It usually took her about twenty minutes, truth be told. All that crap about it taking a few keystrokes and then you’re in was pure malarkey. 

She had time to staple about seven packets with her dwindling staple supply before Tim hurriedly rounded the corner from the direction of Jon’s office, tye-dye novelty shirt still held in a white-knuckled grip. 

Sasha blinked up at him. “That was fast-”

“Sh,” Tim hurriedly said, gesturing to the hallway behind him and looking around. Martin still wasn’t back from his lunch break yet, so they definitely had time- and Tim seemed urgent.

They had been working on clearing out some of the files in the hallways adjacent to the hallway that held Jon’s office, though Sasha hadn’t been close enough on the spider’s web these damn corridors felt like to hear Jon’s voice. Now as they approached the office, with the metal filing cabinets lining the wall blurring in her periphery as she passed, she heard the murmur of Jon’s voice slowly become comprehensible.

Tim was surprisingly light on his feet, barely making a sound as he stopped outside the doorway. Inside of Jon’s office, through the crack, Sasha caught sight of Jon sitting in the middle of the room, furniture pushed to the back corner, reading the statement that Sasha hadn’t been able to record earlier. When Jon said,  _ They didn’t come closer, didn’t make any movement at all…  _ with theatrical presence, she was almost sure they’d been caught already.

That wasn’t what Tim was looking at though. Sasha crept closer to the door, watching the angle shift ever so slightly and finally catching sight of the papers that dripped a viscous fluid in Jon’s hands. 

“‘Can I have a cigarette?’ It spoke again in the same flat voice,” Jon narrated, eyes fixed on the page with pupils that were so thin that his eyes looked almost entirely gold, “and I realized exactly what was wrong,” 

From the words on the white pages themselves, there was a black, oozing substance dripping onto the floor. It caught the buzzing light of the fluorescent bulbs overhead, oil iridescence shimmering where it warped against the wooden boards. Jon remained unaffected, narrating the shape of a swaying man, not quite touching the ground. With the faint rustle of a page turning, the words, incomprehensible from Sasha’s distance, shifted against the paper as if trying to escape. 

The oozing substance on the floor, not quite liquid and not quite solid, raised in the air with the languid motion of ferrofluid in slow motion. It slickly slid against the air in thick ribbons, as though clutching onto invisible particles of gas as violet-ebony-navy-dark-void-color-presence flowed back in on itself, forcing itself into conceivable form with the sick squelching of putty. Sasha’s stomach rolled in turn as the blob of tar reformed itself into the image of a human, measuring perhaps twenty centimeters in height, utterly featureless except for an outstretched hand and something long curled around its waist.

The place where the facsimile of a human would have had a mouth gaped, tearing itself open and working its jaw before mouthing a single question, over and over-  _ can I have a cigarette? _

“I haven’t quit smoking,” Jon finished, and even though Sasha had never started, she felt the sentiment that seeing this would deter the unlucky statement giver, “but I do find I take a lot more taxis now if I find myself out too late. Statement ends.”

Tim and Sasha stayed where they were in the doorway, watching with apprehension and the breath trapped inside of them as Jon examined the… creature, or homunculus or  _ whatever  _ little thing he’d created. Jon’s hands were full of claws when he picked it up, looking it over. “The investigation at the time found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Watts' statement- but I can assure you that it did happen.

“I was expecting the resulting creature to be a little truer to the size of the original mentioned, but I suspect that several factors limited the size of the imprint, including Mr. Watts’ drunken state and the relatively small role the creature had upon his life after the incident. As for its alignment…” Jon paused. 

Then, with no warning or time to prepare, Jon bit the top half of the humanoid creature clean off. 

The bottom half writhed in his hand, inky legs kicking out as dozens of sharp teeth cut cleanly through the mouth that was still begging, between Jon’s teeth-  _ can I have a cigarette? Can I have a cigarette?  _ whined the creature as an arm, held into its inky sockets by the barest of threads, poked through the cage of Jon’s teeth and stretched its hand out, fingers pivoting woodenly as though searching for purchase somewhere in the empty expanse of the air. Jon bit again and it was all swallowed down, leaving nothing but a pair of wildly kicking legs in hand.

“Hm. I won’t lie and say that was at all pleasant,” Jon said, grimacing at the taste. Sasha distantly thought that she was a little close to throwing up, and when she glanced at Tim, he looked a bit green as well. “There is a strong aftertaste of cheap alcohol, which doesn’t help with the powerful tobacco-and-leather taste encasing the creature underneath. At its core, however, the unmistakable combination of butter, glue, and plastic mark this as a Stranger manifestation. I will likely need to head to Old Fishmarket Close myself…” 

That was about as much as she could take as Jon took a pause to finish his meal. Sasha left the doorway and very calmly walked down the hall, still hearing Jon’s closing comments about investigating the case echo behind her. She closed her eyes and counted down from ten, trying to silence the beating of her heart. Tim caught up soon enough, breathing somewhat labored as he uttered, “What the fuck,” 

“I don’t know,” Sasha shook her head a bit, trying to process, “I don’t know,”

“What the  _ fuck,”  _ Tim repeated. “That’s not- that doesn’t just... happen,”

“I mean, dragon magic can be pretty surprising,” Sasha shrugged somewhat helplessly. “It… it probably isn’t  _ common,  _ but I’m sure similar abilities are… elsewhere,”

“Sasha,” Tim said, bracing himself against a wall, “dragons normally have like- protect your treasure or make things freeze or mind reading or some kind of- who the hell wishes for a power like that?”

Sasha opened her mouth to answer, but truth be told, she didn’t know.

It wasn’t that dragons were everywhere; in fact, they were fairly rare. It was just that they were just common enough and just intertwined with humans enough that it was common knowledge of how dragons were hatched. Every human had the capacity to, if they had a desire deep enough and grief strong enough, make a single wish, consciously or not. 

The answer to that wish manifested as a dragon egg, and in time, a dragon with the magic that would cure what ailed the wisher. The only drawback was that the magic involved was highly specific. So long as someone understood a dragon’s magic, they could understand the exact wish that brought them to life and understand the sort of person who had raised them. 

And whoever had wished for Jonathan Sims seemed to have made a very violent wish indeed.

“Who knows,” Sasha said, “But then again, it probably isn’t our place to ask? It’s like saying, gee Tim, how come your parents let you have ballet lessons when you were a kid?”

“Flexibility isn’t even on the same level as- whatever that was,” Tim said, “and you know it.”

“Well, obviously, but,” Sasha gently laid a hand on Tim’s shoulder, looking down at him, “I really think we might be running on high emotions and just might be a little freaked out right now. It was… a really weird thing to see,”

“Sasha, that thing looked like it was  _ speaking.  _ Like it was  _ sentient.”  _

“Yes, but it also was a manifestation of a horrible monster, so… and I mean, he did warn us earlier that he didn’t want to do a demonstration because it’d be a lot.” Sasha smiled a bit, trying to lighten the mood, “I think maybe it’d be best if you got back to stapling and I asked about staples, in that case.”

For a moment, Tim looked like he was about to argue, about to drag the conversation a bit- but he closed his mouth. Took a deep breath. “Okay- just. Okay.”

“You can even take a break if you want,” Sasha suggested. “I’ll tell Jon you’re hard at work regardless.”

“No, no… stapling is fine. It’s just,” Tim shook his head, “It’s already just been a weird first day, you know?”

“Yeah,” Sasha squeezed his shoulder one more time, “I know,”


	2. Goulash and Grinning Ghouls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the eating habits of Jonathan Sims and the goulash unfortunately left in the fridge.

Martin felt like he might’ve happened upon some good luck, all things considered.

Of course, he’d felt nothing but icy dread to learn that he was on a probationary period – if he lost the job he’d had to lie his way into, the wringer of applications and rationing he’d have to go through again was a nightmare he didn’t want to repeat for a lifetime – but it he was quickly finding that it wasn’t too hard to follow the instructions and tasks he’d been given.

He felt a pang for Tim and Sasha. Jon’s strangely cagey withholding of the archive’s organizational system had to be a bit infuriating for anyone who had the background to want to compare it to what they knew. Martin wondered if it was a dragon thing to be territorial.

It was a bit of a boon to Martin, though, as it meant that his probably juvenile questions on archival procedures might be taken care of by the near-complete reliance on Jon’s discretion that he seemed to want to enforce. It bought him some time to get his own bearings, and with Jon apparently forbidden to “fire them normally”, whatever _that_ had meant, there was hope in his heart that Martin would be able to show that he was trustworthy and capable enough to stay by the time probation was over.

Jon himself was… well. He seemed a tad snappish- with his words instead of his jaws, thankfully- and really made zero effort to hide his annoyance at anything. But it so far didn’t seem to be directed at _Martin_. Dragon or not, he was accommodating when Martin went to him at the end of the day with a stack of statement references he had no idea what to do with. He’d even looked a little proud when Martin had confessed how daunting he felt the archives seemed to navigate! Martin hadn’t exactly… meant for Jon to catch what he said, but he was glad it got that reaction nonetheless!

Leaving the office that evening, his mind had drifted to the alleged array of running assistants. He just rooted himself deeper into determination to prove himself the outlier.

Martin was doing well. He hoped he was doing well.

It was with that tentative optimism that Martin stepped into the Head Archivist’s office the next day, a non-recordable statement and several mugs of tea in hand.

Jon looked entirely human as he seemed to be intently focused on jotting something down, some of his long hair escaping its tie and obscuring part of his face. Combined with the loose-looking sweater and long skirt, the ensemble reminded Martin of a swept-up English teacher that probably owned an army of cats; and his rather cluttered table strewn with notes and stationary and homely-looking paraphernalia certainly fit. He didn’t look up as Martin made his way to the desk.

“I, uh, found one of those statements that wouldn’t record? This was something about a coffin. And I thought I’d get a head start on teatime for everyone!”

Jon nodded and wordlessly accepted the statement, still not looking up, and then seemed to consider it for a while. Sliding it under an open notebook, he returned to his own notes.

“I do already have all I need for teatime on hand for now,” and here he confusingly made a vague gesture towards the notebook, “but it’s fine for later, I suppose. Thank you, Martin.”

He still made no move to either clear a space or take a mug from the cluster in Martin’s hand.

Martin coughed, “Should I, uh, just move some stuff and set this down, or…?”

“What?” said Jon, confused, and he finally looked up. He seemed to register for the first time what Martin was holding and it was then that Martin realized that Jon probably thought he meant the statement when he talked about teatime.

“I made everyone some tea, actually.”

“Ah. I’ll have to decline, in that case.” Jon said dismissively, “I’d rather not spend my evening doubled over sick.”

Martin’s heart dropped into his stomach. _That_ sure hurt- but he was used to that. There was a moment of stunned silence as he tried to will himself to say something in response.

He didn’t have to though, because Jon’s expression briefly turned a bit alarmed as he continued, “It wasn’t an accusation. I _don’t_ think you were trying to poison me, I just- It’s not just your tea. It’s not just tea, in general, either. I’m allergic to most human food.”

_Oh._ That made sense, although Martin had really just assumed that Jon was insulting his tea-making. He briefly thought back to the wariness of taking in new assistants and wondered if poisoning was something Jon had to actively look out for.

“By most, you mean...?:

“I’ve found that sweets are fine. Candies and chocolate and the like, though I couldn’t tell you why. And then there’s…” He trailed off and eyed an opaque container on his desk. “Um. Only candies, actually, on second thought.”

Martin, Tim and Sasha would be finding out strange things about dragons for a while, it seemed. He decided to file that one under ‘ominous’ and not pry. “Maybe I could make you some hot chocolate instead?”

“Hot chocolate would do, yes. But as I said, I’m fine on teatime, for now.” Jon gestured at the open notebook again, which, now that Martin was paying attention, he saw was scrawled page to page with the words “keep watching” on repeat. The image of Jon chewing on the paper like a rather miserable goat came to mind.

“Is that a, uh, statement?” he asked.

“Part of one. I had the rest during lunch.”

“I thought you could eat a whole calliope in a go?”

Jon’s face crinkled a bit at the mention of the calliope. “Yes, well, after having three buttery, glue-filled meals in a row I thought I’d savor what little Beholding I could get. Nothing to say for the texture of paper, but the taste- Um. Anyway. I believe you still do have to deliver the tea to the others and get to work?”

“Oh! Uh, right! I’ll be going then.”

As Martin let himself out of Jon’s office, he thought he could hear the sound of tearing paper. Jon was getting right to it, he supposed.

Well, misunderstanding aside, he now knew what specifically to get for Jon, so, not a complete disaster! He could search up some good hot chocolate recipes and try them at home, maybe call up his neighbor to give it a taste test before giving any to Jon –

…God. That conversation may have not been a disaster, but Martin felt the flutter of excitement and wasn’t sure if the same could be said for himself.

* * *

Sasha now owed him multiple drinks, Tim decided as he found himself making his way to the archives at 10 o’clock on a Sunday.

The main doors to the institute weren’t even open – he’d had to make a detour around the block to a back door that Sasha had found squirreled away in an unused spot of the building. It apparently led straight down to the archives via a drop that would have probably been hazardous to travel down, if not for the stepladder that Sasha had planted there on Friday. Enabling his daring feats of espionage aside, he was starting to think that this particular entrance was both in violation of several employee safety regulations and a setup for someone to take a tumble after their assistant pulled the wrong lever.

Technically coming to his own workplace to have time to explore it more without being on the clock wasn’t criminal enough intent to be considered espionage, but between Tim and Sasha planning this out and even using a secret passageway, he liked to think of it as a brilliant team-up making strides. The study for the ages: figuring out the thrilling mystery of what the hell was up with their boss.

That and he wanted to retrieve the leftover goulash from Friday’s lunch that he shoved in the breakroom’s mini-fridge. That was definitely a cover he’d thought up in case he got found out and not because he forgot to take it home and got peckish for some good soup.

The archives made him feel uneasy, sometimes. It wasn’t just the sight of his boss eating the… _thing_ he’d created a few days ago; the place was rife with oddly arranged stacks that blocked and obscured paths between the shelves, making it a perfect place for things to be hidden and lurking. Not to mention being the direct opposite of organized. He had honestly no idea how Sims was able to make sense of the system, much less pinpoint where to find specific files and statements. It didn’t even look like there _was_ a system.

He wondered if it was less on purpose and more that Jon was a poor old man going batty with age. He knew that the timeline of dragons’ aging looked like it was all over the place, from rumors of teenagers who said they hatched the day before to centuries’ old beings being trapped in the bodies of middle-aged men. From both his demeanor and fashion sense, he wouldn’t be surprised if someone told him that Jon was actually a couple hundred. Or somewhere close to grandma-aged.

Better to start with familiar ground and check the goulash in the breakroom, anyhow. He made his way to the fridge and had a look.

His food was still there, which he quickly took out of the rather crowded fridge and set on the countertop beside him. Tim was about to close the door when he took notice of what was making the fridge so crowded.

Tim hadn’t been working in the archives for long, but he had picked up on his coworkers’ lunch habits. Sasha bought and finished her food on the spot; Martin seemed to usually just set his on the countertop. Even if they did make use of the fridge, he was pretty sure that apart from a few boxes of chocolates lining the door, what was filling the rest of the thing wasn’t exactly food.

He reached in and pulled out one of the eight mason jars filled with an odd, clear liquid. Suspended inside the liquid were several mounds of vaguely round objects, reddish-white with some folds hanging off the sides and on each one there was a dilated-

He was holding a jar of eyes. What the _fuck_ why would there be a jar of **eyes-**

A yell came from somewhere else in the archives and cut through his train of thought. Tim didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that he seized up and tugged the thing closer to himself. If he hadn’t been alerted he’d probably have shattered it on the damn floor- he’d stored his _food_ next to jars full of _eyes_ , _fuck._ \- and he didn’t need anyone to hear it break and come over to investigate.

Who _would_ be coming to investigate, he wondered- the voice sounded male, and by the surprise in it, it sounded like it’d stumbled onto something _else_ . He briefly considered just making a raincheck and going back up where he came, but it was probably bad form to leave when there could be a scuffle going on. He was pretty sure that if something happened to the archives and he was suspected of it without having an explanation ready he _would_ be having to deal with a murderous dragon one way or another. 

As quietly as possible, he placed the jar on the countertop and reached for the largest kitchen knife he could find. The weirdness of there even being kitchen knives in a company communal kitchenette with no oven was still nagging at him, but he wasn’t about to question any means of self defense. Cautiously he followed the direction of the sound, towards… the Head Archivists’ office. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

He hated how much the shelves bore down on him. The place was crowded and slightly dim even when the lights-

_Bloody hell,_ he was an idiot. He was so accustomed to coming into the institute with others already present that he hadn’t thought to notice that some of the lights were already on when he made his way down here.

As he approached the area, he heard snippets of a voice waft through the walls amidst the pounding rush of blood in his own ears.

“-Damn bloody _git_ -“

“-springing random people down here as assistants-“

“-worsened his bloody incessant _spying,_ as if-“

Well, Tim’s suspicions on who else could possibly be down in the archives at strange times were confirmed. That was definitely Jon’s voice, though it sounded leagues more incensed and with none of the stuffy professional decorum that he was used to hearing so far. Seemingly ranting about something.

There was something else in his voice, too. Tim thought he could hear the beginnings of a growl etching its way between Jon’s words as the anger in his voice peaked. He’d never heard Jon sound so… lively, before. It made it much easier for his mind to betray him and supply the image of a pacing beast in place of what he knew- well, hoped, he wasn’t sure if dragons ever abandoned humanoid form altogether, he’d never _asked-_ was the thin, somewhat reedy-looking frame of Jonathan Sims.

“-can’t even let them quit if they wanted-“

“-tripped out of the gate with that one, made him think I suspected him of _poisoning_ me-“

_“… Are you_ actually _asking me to comment on your little assistants’ impression of you…?”_

Tim paused. That was a voice he’d never heard before. Its response came in a drawled inflection that made it sound both incredibly bored and lightly amused. It sort of sounded like if a Cheshire cat had mistook weed for catnip.

He rounded the corner and saw that the furniture had been pushed to a corner, which probably meant that Jon was eating again. As he crept closer, both the dragon and the other speaker came into view. ‘The dragon’, because Tim was having a hard time believing that what was standing in the room was actually Jon.

One, he was wearing a neon yellow leopard print crop top over fishnet.

Two, his humanoid silhouette was interrupted by what looked to Tim like elongated bony plates, jutting out from his spine and folding onto each other to create a ridge that rested on his back. A ridge that left regular, open slots containing loose pieces of paper, within reach underneath the crop top. There was a rhythm to the form of them curving downward along his spine, and they led into a long, lizard-like tail that swished violently as Jon ranted and came to a rest when he heard the question. Adding to the already notably tall height were a set of horns curving up and back in on themselves.

Three, _he was wearing a neon yellow leopard print crop top over fishnet._ Tim would’ve genuinely believed that a whole other dragon had broken into the archives if he wasn’t also still wearing the glasses retainers and skirt, which only served to cause him more whiplash.

Tim didn’t get a very good look at the figure Jon was talking to. It seemed taller than even Jon was, had a strange wrongness to the proportions in its arms, and from the flashes of colour he caught, was probably also dressed like a drunken teenager at a rave.

Or maybe it was Tim who was drunk, or on drugs, or dead. He honestly couldn’t be sure anymore.

Jon paused his impassioned rant at the figure’s question, turning his head slightly. Tim mentally cursed when he realized that he was about to be spotted and ducked behind the far wall, hoping it would be enough to keep him from their view.

As he heard the conversation continue from his new position, Jon’s anger seemed to fizzle out a bit and his voice went back to the mild-but-mildly-put-upon tone Tim had come to expect.

“I am... describing what happened. Whether or not you comment isn’t for me to decide.”

“ _Hmm. Am I being used as an echo to expel your grief, then? Surely it’d be wiser to spill yourself to a photograph who’s image doesn’t lie._ ”

“That depends on whether or not you comment, doesn’t it? Give me a response and maybe this would be a _conversation_ instead of me musing to some colourful air arranged in his image.”

There was a pause as the figure seemed to consider. _“You realise, I am the throat of delusion incarnate, what your assistant might fear more so than he would yourself...”_

“Yes.”

_“...And that poor Michael had a spectacularly painful run of first impressions.”_

That got a laugh from Jon. It sounded more like a rebuff than anything, but Tim thought he could also hear a bit of… fondness… in it? “Don’t I know it,” said Jon, under his breath.

_“Hmm. Perhaps you should bear what’s yours to him, then, it is rather against the nature of this place to keep information hidden, is it not?”_

“If it were then this place hasn’t exactly been following that nature, has it. You’d know from his experience.”

Now the figure must’ve been considering something for a while. “ _I… believe that what I am meaning is best understood when phrased as… ‘be yourself’?”_

Jon scoffed at the suggestion. He was audibly and openly making a face, if the tone of his voice was anything to go by. “Right, then. Your advice continues to be terrible and you’re all lies as always. I am _not_ going to make my assistants any more skittish by flaunting my personal matters beyond what’s necessary.” 

That elicited a laugh from the figure that made Tim _seriously_ wish it hadn’t. It was the kind of laugh that sounded like it was two syllables away from becoming a sob, but the only emotions behind it were amusement and a bit of disbelief. The sound of it bounded around Tim’s skull like a slippery ping pong ball before fading away and left him with even more of a headache than seeing Jon in the crop top had caused.

_“Believe what you will. It really doesn’t matter what your assistants think of you, considering the fate that you’ll allow to befall them,”_ it said between its laughs.

Jon’s tone turned defensive. “Yes, it _does_ \- I do intend to _protect_ them from meeting that fate.”

“ _That is not what you do.”_

“It’s what- it’s not what she- she didn’t manage to protect them, no, but I won’t let this happen again, I just… need to make better choices, than she did.”

That laugh again. “ _Oh, having choices is not what you do, either, wishgranter_.”

“Maybe not, but I was- I was made for it. The choice of trying to protect them has been made _for_ me, and I won’t let there be a repeat of what happened to- what happened to Michael.” Jon’s voice took on that angry undercurrent again. Not to the point of growling, but close.

_“Still bitter about the assistant? I don’t think I was the one he needed the most protection from in the end, not really. I wasn’t reaching for him to consume, you know, but we all must do what we do and feed.”_

Jon sighed, and for a moment he just sounded tired. “That much I agree with.”

Then he was really growling. Something deep and resonant, from the base of his chest, then up and out.

Tim wasn’t exactly sure _when_ he started booking it down the hall, tearing back through the archives, but he knew he’d heard a sudden crash. The voice that had been talking to Jon gave a loud yell. Several screams later, there was the sound of gnashing teeth followed by the sick sound of snapping.

This time he was goddamn glad he wasn’t able to see Jon’s lunch.

* * *

Jon was a fourth of the way done with working through his rather hefty meal when he noticed the footsteps. He really should’ve been more alert- he could hear his mother’s severe voice scolding him already.

In all fairness, though, the Distortion statements had taken on a rather distracting quality in taste and demeanor these past few years. They’d always tasted rather tangy with textures he’d never been able to place- all of the Spiral did- but the Distortion’s most recent form added a horribly familiar hint to it that he knew all too well from years of inhaling it around the archives. (And from the brief period of time when he’d nipped at everything and everyone in his vicinity. It was a phase that he’d rather not think about, to be fair.)

Instead he put his focus on puzzling out the footsteps. They were lithe and fast, definitely softer than he’d expect from the pace they were carrying.

_Tim._

Well that certainly wasn’t… ideal. He dreaded to find out how much Tim had seen of that conversation already. It was unfortunately ironic that he’d have a run-in with someone seeing his more uncanny eating habits when he was _just_ poring over how to make a better impression on his assistants.

Being chased through the archives was never pleasant (that much Jon knew from experience) but it would do his archives much worse if Tim were to jump to any more conclusions than Elias had probably already sent him down. He hastily put away most of his other draconic features, unfurled his wings with a quick stretch and took off after his assistant down the widened hallways.

It turned out that direct pursuit wasn’t necessary, though, as between his wings providing him propulsion and better knowing the routes through the archives, he managed to reach the exit he assumed Tim was aiming for before Tim could round the final corner. Skidding to a stop, he came to a halt and was immediately face-to-face with his assistant.

Jon winced a bit at the sight. Tim looked rather shaken, if the wild expression on his face was anything to go by. And he was holding…

“Tim. I see you’re holding a knife.”

Tim’s gaze shot down to Jon’s own hand. He was still breathing heavily. “Well, _you’re_ holding a flesh pad with a pointy bit at the end.”

“What?” Jon looked down, and, _oh,_ he was still holding one of the distortion’s malformed hands. He must have forgotten to set it aside in his rush to get to Tim.

The thumb and most of the fingers had already been eaten, and only the middle excuse-for-a-finger remained, slack and dangling from its palm. It lolled a bit as Jon brought it up to chest height. Jon winced again.

“This is… um, part of my meal. It’s supposed to be what it has for hands?”

“Okay, I _did not_ need to know that.”

“Sorry.”

Jon wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, but his mind did provide him with the intrusive reminder that he was currently inadvertently flipping off his coworker. That probably wouldn’t do. He was about to bring out his fangs to bite it off and finish the job before he remembered who was standing in front of him.

He awkwardly retracted the hand and snapped the finger off behind his back. Jon hoped that the resulting _crack_ wasn’t as audible to Tim as it was to him. It was terrible.

He placed the remnants on a nearby shelf looming beside the exit and faced Tim again. “Why are you in the archives on a Sunday?”

“…Goulash,” Tim answered non-committedly, still regarding him with a face of bewilderment and slight terror. “Why are _you_ here on a Sunday? What are you _wearing-_ what was all of _that!?”_

Jon sighed. “I live here, that was my breakfast, and I’m wearing… clothes? I don’t understand why that bit is worth attention…?”

“You look like a reject from Zoolander. And the thing you were eating, you were _talking_ to it! I thought you said you ate statements!?”

“I don’t know what Zoolander… is… but I am aware that this is less than professional, thus I usually stick to something more subdued during work hours. I would _think_ that I’m allowed to dress a bit more casually when I’m off the clock in my own place of residence.”

“Casually… yeah…” Tim seemed to be staring at the star pins Jon kept on his top now.

“As for what you saw,” Jon continued, a bit annoyed at the staring,” that _was_ a statement. My reading of them creates imprints of the creatures, artefacts or phenomena they are regarding. I apologize for what you saw, that was… hmm, actually, how much _did_ you see?”

“Little bits of you talking to the hands thing and your… eating… noises. I couldn’t get a look at the last bit.”

_Ah_ , _that’s a relief_. At least Tim hadn’t gotten much more than what the odd library staff coming down here would. He was glad to have at least spared him from seeing a dismemberment during the first week of his employ.

“That particular creature is called the Distortion. It’s one of the more recurring monsters featured in these statements.” He paused for a beat, “I was just asking it for more details on what happened. To get a more thorough sense of the whole affair.” He felt his chest knot up already. Never was good at lying.

When Tim didn’t say anything, Jon cleared his throat and elaborated. “I assure you that as much as it seemed sentient, it _is_ merely an imprint of information conjured from the experiences of the statement giver and supplemented with what I know of the subject. The actual Distortion is unaffected by what I might do to its copy. I’m sorry for what you experienced- I’ve been told it can be a bit… unsettling.”

Tim seemed to… well, not calm down, but he did seem able to orient himself a bit more. “Right… sorry I barged in on your, uh, home… boss.” He seemed to be fiddling with his phone.

“Mhmm.”

He heard the snap of a camera being discreetly set off.

Of course, it was never as discreet as humans seemed to think it was. To a very well-trained ear, there was still the subtle sound of machinery and the sound of fingertips against glass. 

“Tim, don’t take pictures of me without- oh, what the hell.” As inappropriate as it was, he supposed that it would be better if Martin and Sasha saw his features through a picture beforehand, if this was the reaction he was potentially to meet. Scowling, he let his horns, ridge and tail reassert themselves on his form. From there, it was just about switching out the parts that appeared human; teeth turned to fangs; nails turned to talons; the skin of his hands and forearms turned over into scales.

There was a sharp intake of breath from Tim. “Uh, what-“

“I still would much rather you not try to keep sneaking that camera on me, but if you are to show the fact that I have wings to the other assistants, it’d be more efficient if you showed everything at once.”

“Riiight, the _wings_. Um. Well then, say cheese…?” Tim was staring at the pins again.

Jon did not, in fact, say cheese, and instead presented his teeth to the camera with something close to a snarl. With that done, he curtly said, “Please ask next time, if you absolutely _must_ take a picture.”

“... Alrighty then boss. I guess I’ll be seeing you Monday, then?”

“Yes, you will. I assume you can see yourself out?” Jon gestured to the door as he stepped aside.

Tim said, “Yeah. Um. Thanks for the explanation, and the picture.” 

“Mhmm.” Before Tim could walk through the door, Jon stopped him with an arm, looking at him balefully. “Please remember to bring the knife back Monday. And please refrain from taking weapons from the Archives without permission in future.”

Tim tensed, “... You don’t want me to give it back now?”

Jon shook his head, stepping away and leaving the exit open. “I… have a feeling you’ll feel safer with it, for the ride home.”

“... Right,” Tim said, clutching the knife closer in hand. He said no more and left.

As Tim’s footsteps receded from the archives, there was a familiar creak of a door behind Jon and he gave a tired groan.

_“You made such an impression on your assistant that I think he forgot his soup.”_

Jon snatched the remnants off the shelf he’d put them on, and brandished the Distortion’s own hand with its middle finger loosely attached directly at its face.

“Piss off, Michael.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be released on August 21st!


	3. Cronuts and Covert Company

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the bizarre organizational system of the Archives as documented by Sasha James, the serendipity of clues, and the nature of making wishes.

Sasha came into the Archives at six o'clock sharp on a Monday morning with three things in mind: she needed to make sure Jon hadn’t moved any statements around over the weekend; she needed to be sure that Jon hadn’t figured out that she was slowly figuring out his statement organizational system; and she needed to get into Jon’s computer, ASAP.

It was much slower going than she would have liked as she crept down the barren hallway that connected the reception to the Archives and the circular room where the assistants’ desks were, crowded together back to back. There were scuff marks on the floor that made it seem like there had been more desks, once upon a time, but they must have already been thrown into some dusty storage somewhere. Sasha was coming down the ninth hallway connected to the place, and across the room, next to a low table full of staplers and loose papers, was the tenth hallway that led to the surprisingly well-decorated break room.

The thing that made this place so eerie, and made the Archives such a maze, were the eight additional hallways that ringed around the assistants’ workspace. Even Sasha had trouble navigating the first few days, with all eight document branches filled with offshoot little hallways stacked floor to a somewhat low ceiling with filing cabinets and statements. It didn’t help that all those little hallways seemed to interconnect all four main hallways a piece, like some kind of web woven on either side.

The eighth hallway was only marginally more navigable because of Jon’s office being settled there. Even then, it seemed chock full of more of the inconvenient little obstacles he’d left around; errant boxes here or there, random cabinets shimmied out from the wall to make the space smaller, and many of the utility closets being left open.

It made Sasha wonder where exactly Jon might have been sleeping- she’d been in his office, and other than a door to Document Storage behind his desk, there didn’t seem to be any space to really _live._ There was the break room couch, of course, but no matter how comfortable it was, that didn’t change the fact that there was almost no room for personal effects.

That only meant that as Sasha tiptoed toward the seventh hallway, she was looking over her shoulder to make sure that Jon wouldn’t pop out of anywhere. From what Tim had said, if it were true that Jon was asleep somewhere in the Archives, then he would almost certainly hear her. The buzzing fluorescent lights above clicked on a few minutes into her walk, likely in preparation for the day ahead, and she hoped the buzz would be enough to hide her.

The seventh hallway, while closest to the eighth, was the hallway that had an organization that she was closest to understanding. From what she had gathered, seven of the eight hallways had documents relating to two common themes that were connected somehow. Of the hallways, Sasha was closest to parsing out the meaning of two. 

The eighth hallway was a bit of an outlier, only containing statements with a common theme of pollution, environmental destruction, and various otherworldly ills. (She couldn’t quite parse out why those statements were closest to the Head Archivist’s Office, but she had a feeling it wasn’t because Gertrude or Jon were especially ecofriendly.)

The seventh hallway seemed full of statements all relating to big things and all the claustrophobia in its inverse.

Things that were vast and made someone feel small just by existing and things that were vast and made someone feel small by burying them under their vastness. Heights and depths and skies and earth, all with statement givers talking about having too much air and having too little air. Sasha didn’t quite have the names for them yet, but she had a feeling that she would figure them out in time.

She gently pressed a hand against the wall of cabinets to her right, feeling along the rows of cold metal until her fingertips caught on the most minute of three indented pinpricks in metal. The indents themselves were so imperceptible that it was impossible to see without pressing one’s face directly against the drawer to catch the dips in the paint. At first, Sasha had taken the indents to mean that there were times when Jon had forgotten to put his claws away and had accidentally nicked something around him; but as she spent more time feeling around the other hallways, she’d found the same indents. A pattern began to emerge.

Very little of Jon’s ‘mistakes’ in running the Archives were accidental, and once she knew that, the layout of the Archives began to take shape.

As quietly as she could, she reached up and gently began to pull the drawer out, centimeter by centimeter. She knew to be careful because, without fail, each and every one of the marked drawers had a tendency to squeal on rusted hinges when opened normally. She also knew that the first time she’d opened this cabinet, Jon had come rushing up behind her from the other end of the Archives, where he shouldn’t have been able to hear, quickly asking her to come help with some other task far away from it. 

It took a few long, agonizing seconds as Sasha kept an ear open, trying to pinpoint the flutter of wings or the sound of footsteps slinking closer. None came. She opened the cabinet and slipped the top five statements out.

The first four were fake, as expected. The fifth began with, _statement of Dominic Swain,_ and she had the sense that Jon hadn’t moved anything around in their absence. That was all the better for her- it meant that she could hopefully figure out why statements about odd books seemed to be at the center of each theme.

It was one of the few constants of the Archive hallways. No matter how many fake statements, no matter how many real statements were marked with “audio accessible” only for the audio files to be mysteriously missing, and no matter the organization of the nearby cabinets, the indented drawers were always full of statements about magic books. Some of them were labeled Leitner, others weren’t labeled, and it all seemed terribly important.

Sasha slowly closed the cabinet door and crouched near the ground along the left wall of the hallway, searching for the second book-based horror story. When she found _statement of Enrique MacMillan,_ she closed the door and snuck back into the assistants’ quarters.

Statement 0031104 had been the first statement that she had really gotten the chance to glance over, back on Thursday. She’d been trying to find a cross-reference for an obviously fake statement about a dog with “evil body odor” when her eye had caught it, just kind of sticking out a few centimeters from the rest of the statements. The story of a book that entreated the statement giver to _dig, just dig_ felt like getting her hands on something truly remarkable.

Statement 0132806 had been the second to catch her eye as she began to dig into the mystery of the marked cabinets, promising a page-turner of a story. She’d glanced over it, reading about the book worth thousands sitting in a charity shop, and was absolutely sure that she had to analyze it. She slowly crept to her desk and slipped both statements into her bag, hiding the folders underneath a mass of magazines she’d stuffed in at the corner store on her way in. 

Sasha still had more statements she wanted to read. But, Sasha didn’t want to take the chance of Jon realizing that too many files were gone, so just these two would have to do for now.

Items one and two down, Sasha paused, taking a moment to listen. When she poked her head into the break room to see if she could find any trace of his snoozing, she found a fire escape and an empty couch. There was still no sign of Jon, whether waking or asleep.

Before stepping into the Head Archivist’s Office, Sasha walked up and down the length of the eighth hallway, looking for somewhere where a hidden room or offshoot hallway might lead to a bedroom, but there was nothing. Hallway closets, while more numerous than those in the other branches of the Archives, were shallower and had solid concrete at their backs. There were no secrets hidden near the floorboards and no indication that there was even a way out of the Archives, beside the single exit up many flights of stairs and the elevator at the end of the hall. 

Not for the first time, Sasha wondered how no one had brought up that the place was a giant fire hazard just waiting to be lit.

Finally, Sasha tried the doorknob to the Head Archivist’s Office, pushing the metal up and in the direction of the hinges just in case it had a similar squeakiness to the cabinets. The heavy wood glided open with nary a sound. As she held the doorknob and slipped through the narrow amount of space she allowed herself, Sasha took a moment to be surprised that it was unlocked.

There were few windows in the Archives as was, and in the office, there was no difference. As Sasha gently closed the door behind her, not allowing the knob to turn back on its own and guiding it manually, she reached into her pocket for a phone to stave off the unrelenting darkness. She guessed it made sense, that nothing would turn on in there without Jon- Jon apparently didn’t need sight to get around dim spaces. 

Turning the torch on in her phone, she deliberately kept the full light of it towards the edges of the room, using the glow at its periphery to get a look at the room, just in case Jon was still at his desk like they’d left him on Friday. His desk, and the room at large, remained empty. The space was as cluttered as Sasha had come to expect from Jon, but she had no doubt that if she spent some time looking among the stacks and the books lining the bookshelves pressed against the adjacent two walls that she would find some sort of hidden organizational system.

It took a full minute before Sasha began to move, pressing one foot in front of the other toe first before pressing her heel down. Her trek through the office was even quieter than outside because there was only one room left that Jon could have possibly been in, and if she made too much sound then he was sure to come out. 

She was doing an admirable job keeping quiet, given the circumstances. Which was why upon seeing that Jon’s laptop wasn’t on the desk Sasha’s heart stuttered.

Jon very likely took the laptop with him.

But if it was true that he lived in the Archives, then that meant he was likely asleep. Which meant...

The door to Document Storage was open by just a sliver, which didn’t do wonders with calming Sasha’s nerves. The air was dead in the room as she dodged around furniture and stepped onto the gaudy carpet spread over the center of the room to help muffle her approach. Beyond the door to Document Storage, there was nothing but black, with the sound of whirring fans stuttering in the background as she approached. 

At the shudder she stopped, waiting to see if it meant anything. Nothing came, and no one stirred. Really, the smart thing to do, Sasha reasoned, was to go back out and wait for a more opportune time to hack into Jon’s laptop. There had to have been times that he left the Archives, even if that time didn’t seem to be now. But, then again- she had already made it this far. And she hadn’t had a chance to see what Jon might have stashed in document storage… Nevermind the fact that there was only one place in the Archives where Jon could have possibly been sleeping. 

Even still, there was a burning curiosity that had settled in her chest that refused to go out. There had to have been a reason for everything; for the seemingly horrible mismanagement of the Archives by not one, but two Head Archivists; for the overreliance Jon wanted his assistants to have when finding statements; for the statements that wouldn’t record normally, that must have been real, because Jon was eating them. She was just on the cusp of a mystery, and she simply _had_ to see where it led.

If nothing else, if Jon were asleep there, then she could always claim she was looking for something to get an early start to the day. With that rationale out of the way, she stepped to the door and, with bated breath, shined her phone’s torch into the awaiting darkness. First, the shape of filing cabinets labeled with numbers came into view. Then a window, covered in blinds to keep out the morning light. Then the floor, totally uniform and with no hatch to be seen. The bare wall, with no doors to slip through. Then, shoved in the very back corner, a cot.

There was the drag of something heavy underneath her feet. Sasha’s hand tightened around her phone as she turned the flash off, plunging the Head Archivist’s office into blackness as she held a hand over her mouth, catching the sound of her stuttered breath in a cupped palm. Her eyes adjusted to what she now recognized was the thin, dim light of the brightening morning crawling into the room, but absolutely nothing had changed in the interim. 

The gentle squeak and shudder of a hand against wood sounded, and if her boots weren’t so heavy, she might have felt the warmth of something’s touch dragging against her soles like some fleshy secret hidden within the earth. Sasha held her breath, only allowing minute puffs of air to slowly roll out.

The cot had been empty. Jon wasn’t there.

The dragging underneath slowly pulled itself farther away from her, into and underneath the floorboards in the room. The ground in front of Sasha shifted, creaked terribly under the touch of something that made a dome of pliable wood in the center of the room. A section of the floor that before had seemed seamless was slowly rising, opening until the tips of blackened horns were rising from beneath.

Jon poked his head out from the ground, squinting blearily up at Sasha through the dim light. His voice was still sleepy as he questioned, “Sasha? Is that you up here?”

Sasha let out a large breath she’d been holding as she sagged forward a bit, opening the door all the way. “Christ Jon, way to give me a _heart attack-_ where are you even _coming_ from?”

“My room?” Jon said, trying to sound affronted but mostly just sounding confused. “Where are _you_ coming from?”

“Outside? And then from the Archives proper,” Sasha said, shaking her head a bit. Now that the adrenaline was dying down, this was just feeling awfully silly. “It is Monday, you know.”

Jon squinted up at her for a few more seconds before complaining, “Can you at least turn on the light? I can’t see you like this,”

“Oh! Yeah, sure,” Sasha said, feeling along the wall with her hand clumsily. Eventually, she found the light switch, and both she and Jon took a few seconds to blink rapidly at each other, each trying to get adjusted. No matter how good his hearing was, it looked like Jon’s sight was just as good as anyone else who needed glasses. He shimmied up a bit from the floor, resting bare arms on the ground before him and still squinting in Sasha’s direction, wearing a faded band shirt. His bed head was nothing to sneeze at, curls of thick black hair falling out of the braid he’d put it in and knotting at the base of his horns.

“Good morning- sorry if I woke you,” Sasha said, smiling benignly. 

Jon squinted first at her, then at the clock on the wall beside her head. “Good lord... It’s not even _seven.”_

“Thought I might be able to take some of those staples out of the statements I’d stapled by mistake,” Sasha smiled, as though she hadn’t been stapling at an Archive on purpose, knowing that it was the kind of thing someone without Archival experience wouldn’t notice.

“The metal rusts and can degrade the documents- you should _know-”_ Jon stopped himself, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “No, I suppose you shouldn’t know. My apologies- I’m still not used to having… untrained assistants.”

“That’s fine- happens to the best of us!” Sasha wondered if the apology was genuine or because it was early. Either way, Jon didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss just yet. “I’m sure we’ll settle around each other eventually. Need any help up?”

“Not while I’m wearing these clothes,” Jon gestured to himself. “Seems hardly appropriate for work,”

“Well, it’s not as though I caught you at work this time, isn’t that right?” Sasha asked, watching Jon rub an eye with the back of his hand. “We could go out to breakfast, if you’d like- lets me make this all up to you,” and distract Jon for a while from his Archives, just in case either of the two statements she’d filched were ones he had wanted.

Jon didn’t say anything for a moment, glaring a bit at Sasha. Not much of an early riser, then. Then, he finally said, “... Alright. Let me get dressed.” He reached up and pulled the floor back down over him, descending once again into his weird, secret living quarters.

Sasha waited until the sound of Jon’s footsteps lessened, and then leaned against the doorframe, holding a hand over her heart.

Well. She supposed she would have to just stop the investigation for right now. 

* * *

It had been Tim who had suggested the shared google doc. 

Not verbally, since both of them knew how good Jon’s hearing was, but when Sasha checked her email, there was an invitation to a document called “spooky investigatory actions for the spooky academia job scares”. The title was repeated for posterity at the top of the document in hot pink comic sans. 

Tim wrote in red font: _you got the goods??_

Sasha gently scratched a number from the statement into the notepad by her keyboard before typing back in blue: _yeah, they’re in the breakroom lol. Told Jon all about your love of cronuts and he was insistent on it. Only the best for his assistants!_

_Tim: :/_

_Sasha: especially if that assistant is Tim :),_

_Tim: **:/** _

Sasha cracked a little smile and said casually, “You’re still buying me coffee later, right? I might be dead by the end of the day at this rate,” She typed, _it was like you said. Jon’s hearing is supernaturally good._

“Hey, it’s your turn!” Tim complained, pouting as he typed, _told you, didn’t I? He pinpointed where I was running in a dim Archive with all that cluttered shit in the way- not like I was being loud about it._ “Can’t expect me to pick up the slack on it all, can you?”

 _Found where he’s sleeping, too,_ Sasha typed, _I’ll show you next time in doc storage._ She said, “If it’s a date I can! Whatever happened to gentlemanly conduct?” 

_couldn’t get a look at his comp?_ Tim asked, “Oooh, a date? No one ever said anything about dates,”

“Don’t be coy,” Sasha said laughingly, grabbing a file blindly and glancing at it before answering, “as if you wouldn’t be down for a bit of coffee and a chat with me,” _He took his laptop with him to his room I think. Won’t be able to hack into it until he leaves the Archives during the day._

“Coffee, not really- but _tea,_ well…” Tim winked. Martin, from his desk, cracked a little smile and got up. 

“I’m taking that as my cue, then,” Martin said goodnaturedly.

“You don’t have to!” Sasha said, making a show of pretending to kick Tim under the table. Tim gave a startled yelp, as though she hadn’t just very gently tapped his shin with her foot. “Tim’s just being a shit.”

“I resent that!” Tim said, pouting even more comically, “I am a breath of fresh air, no matter the form I’m in,”

“And yet you’re already smelling fishy to me,” Sasha retorted. She chose to believe that Tim’s completely offended look was part of their tag team act. 

“It’s fine, really-!” Martin rolled his eyes a bit, “It’s about time for tea anyway. I’ll leave you to each other,” 

“Geez, Marto, you make it sound like we’re _flirting_ or something,” Tim said.

Sasha said, “Yeah, Martin, you’re making it sound like we’re _flirts,”_

Martin just shook his head, turning on his heel and calling over his shoulder, “I'm not dignifying that with a response!” Both of them waited as his footsteps retreated down the hall towards the break room, leaving the both of them alone except for the vague hum of computers and the general ambiance of the Archives. 

Now, it wasn’t that they _couldn’t_ trust Martin. Sasha trusted Tim’s judgment, and he’d said that Martin was a trustworthy kind of man with a good head on his shoulders and a good heart. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Martin. It was only that, well, she didn’t really know Martin that well, and springing him in on this investigation of theirs without proper justifiable cause was sure to alienate him. She still wasn’t entirely convinced that they needed to really worry about Jon, and Tim said he was reserving his judgment. It was better to have evidence of Jon actually being a threat, first.

With Martin out of the room, that meant there was little chance of him glancing over while Sasha brought Tim up to speed on her findings. She’d wanted to look at Jon’s laptop to cross-reference and make sure all the information publicly available was correct, but for now, this would do.

Sasha began linking various pdfs in the google doc, along with an old Facebook profile and a website.

_What we know about Jonathan Sims:_

  * _completed his A-levels sometime in 2004. Up until that point was homeschooled, with little record of what his studies until that point entailed. No indication of what year he was hatched. [A-level_scores.pdf]_
  * _enrolled in Oxford University’s Balliol College in 2005. Possibly met his roommate and later girlfriend, Georgina Barker, a fellow dragon, at this time. [facebook profile link]_
  * _He wasn’t involved in any extracurriculars, but apparently went to a few Underwing Support Group meetings in 2005-early 2006. He’s not listed as an official member, but Georgina is. Moral support or genuine participation? [underwingsupport.co.uk]_
  * _There’s documentation that he took a leave of absence in 2006 due to a “family medical emergency”. He made up the classes missed in the summer to remain on track. [Jonathan_Sims_record.pdf]_
  * _Graduated with a degree in English and History in 2008. Applied for Oxford’s Library Sciences degree that same year. [Undergrad_degree.pdf]_
  * _Apparently broke up with Georgina around 2008. Can’t find any newer profiles of Barker’s, but apparently Jon had a MySpace at some point before deleting it. [waybackm_embarrassing_breakup_status.png]_
  * _Graduated with his Library Sciences degree in 2010. He officially became an assistant to Gertrude Robinson directly after. [2nd_degree.pdf] [InstituteEmploy_Contract.pdf]_



_Tim: little light on the personal stuff, huh?_

_Sasha: yeah- it’s why I’d wanted to look at his comp first, but for the moment, this is all we can do._

_Tim: I’ll have a look at facebook if you look at underwing to see if maybe you can figure out what the boss might’ve gotten out of it?_

_Sasha: gotcha_

The underwing website was designed much like any other group therapy website Sasha had ever seen, with white and blue aesthetics that clashed a bit with the somewhat orange tinted banner image of three dragons. Arms were slung around each other and around a fourth human at the end. One of the middle dragons, one with smaller, nubby horns, stretched her white feathered wings out to shield her three compatriots, while the dragon to the left of her pointed to a grinning smile full of fangs. The last dragon’s pink-frilled gills fluttered on his neck, and the human was pressed against his side, grinning the widest of all. 

The tabs were similar too: “home”, “literature”, “our mission”, “events calendar”, “find a meeting”, “for human wishers”, etc. _Underwing Support is a group by dragons for dragons who are struggling with personal goals after completing their wishes or being released from them. We understand that while this is an exciting time, there are many other complex emotions and no small amount of apprehension when finding your new niche in the world. Here, other dragons share their experiences to inspire hope and healing during this difficult transitionary period…_

Sasha glanced over a few more tags- the literature tab had quite a few studies about things such as how the emotions of humans in the moment of making The Wish (always capitalized, of course) can affect everything from more common elemental attributes that dragons have as secondary powers to physical characteristics such as feathered or reptilian wings versus wings made of abstract materials like shadows or water. The mission tab went a little more in detail of the history of draconic-human relations and coming to terms with the reality that both species are codependent, showing signs of even co-evolving together- standard fare there. The events calendar was full of events that weren’t for her, because the group was, ostensibly, for dragons.

The ‘for human wishers’ tab was interesting, though, in that Sasha saw quite a lot of information she hadn’t already known. “Considerations for deliberately making The Wish”, “types of Wishes based on longevity”, “raising your dragon child to be independent”, “living with dragon siblings (for child wishers)”

And at the very top was a section titled, “So you’ve accidentally made The Wish,”. 

_So you’ve accidentally made_ **The Wish.**

_First of all, congratulations! While this is no doubt a confusing and scary time, it is also a time of self-reflection and celebration. As you already know, humans are only capable of making one Wish in their lives, and the dragon resulting from it is someone to be cherished. However, finding a dragon egg when one isn’t expecting it can be baffling and frightening. It may leave prospective parents and siblings out of the loop with what to do. There is no need to worry!_

_In the meantime, before your dragon hatches, it is suggested that you take a step back and re-evaluate your behavior and emotions in the previous six months. It has been proven that nearly 65% of all accidental Wishes are the result of unchecked, overwhelming grief or helplessness with one’s situation. Of those accidental Wishes, only 15% of surveyed Wishers were able to correctly identify what they might have subconsciously wished for, leaving the remaining 85% in the dark as to the specific magic their child may develop…_

The section seemed to go the most in depth, describing what to expect; what to do if a dragon’s wings and horns didn’t appear to be developing; coping with creating a being “with ulterior motive”; and how to release dragons from “wishes of eternity”. Sasha made a mental note to look into the last bit later, because at that moment, Tim gave a somewhat melodramatic gasp.

She glanced around for a moment to make sure no one was coming. Martin had passed them by a bit ago to bring cocoa to Jon, so it was just Sasha and Tim, snooping into things. She asked, “So what’s that about then?”

“You,” Tim said, “have _got_ to see this cat,” 

Before she could get up, he was pasting a picture into the google doc. On the left most side was a somewhat younger Jon, looking far more like a pile of lanky limbs in the vague shape of a person than a person and looking completely alarmed. He was dressed in way too many rhinestones and rather nice eyeliner. Taking up the rest of the picture was a man who never grew out of his goth phase, long hair dyed an obviously artificial black, looking equally alarmed as he sat on a couch. In the goth’s arms was a tiny fluffball of a cat, so round and full of fur that it looked more like a mound of cream and orange hair with a mouth than a living animal. The cat had its mouth wide open in a dramatic scream.

The caption, courtesy of one Georgina Barker, 2006, was _lol my boyfriend and his cousin are useless. that kitten hasn’t stopped screaming once!! /ROLLS EYES_

_Sasha: don’t think i’ve seen that goth around- do you reckon he’ll be down some time?_

_Tim: depends on if the goth’s the boyfriend or the cousin lmao- I don’t know if I’m ready to think about the boss’s love life_

_Sasha: shocking! /s_

_Tim: oh haha, i’m crying laughing_ (Tim’s face had not moved a single inch.) _seriously though, this vid is some good shit_

He sent a video, and Sasha plugged her headphones into the laptop. She paused for a moment, looking behind herself, and saw absolutely nothing. Tim gestured from his desk, pointing at his own eyes and gesturing out to the rest of the Archives, assuring her that he’d keep an eye out. She gave a thumbs up.

Sasha pressed play.

_“- we are NOT naming this cat Bartholomew,” a girl’s voice- Georgina, presumably- said, exasperated. She was holding the camera and therefore wasn’t visible. Instead, the focus was on Jon, petting the fluffy kitten’s head between its ears with two fingers._

_“Why not?!” Jon asked, wholly affronted, “It’s a good name! And it’s topical- Gerry, tell her it’s topical,”_

_The goth, Gerry, gave Jon a_ look, _not even beginning to pretend that he thought this was a good idea. “It sounds like a name a Victorian orphan would have.” He was staying very still, trying not to jostle the kitten still in his arms._

_“It- that is besides the point,” Jon groused, frowning loudly. “It’s a cute pun- Batholo-mew-”_

_“- Wow, a pun,” Gerry said, completely deadpan, “Now we have to go with it,”_

_“Help me jesus,” The camera turned around, showing the partial face of Georgina Barker, a woman with dark brown skin and part of a pitch-black horn curving from her forehead and around her cheek like vines, “You see this? Do you see what we’re dealing with,”_

_The camera turned back to catch the kitten suddenly standing up in Gerry’s arms and throwing its head back to meow as loudly and long as it possibly could. Gerry went even more still, watching the creature with wide eyes as though wholly unfamiliar with cats as a concept. Jon looked similarly spooked. Georgina started laughing at both of them, the camera shaking a little in her hold. “Oh my God you guys,”_

_“I don’t think he likes Bartholomew,” Gerry said, gingerly holding the little feline up in one hand. The kitten was the fattest little creature, and its head was similarly rolling back before it tossed itself forward and started nibbling on one of Gerry’s rings. Gerry, for his part, seemed particularly delighted by this. After a beat, Gerry said, “... We could just be done with it and name him ‘Cat’.”_

Jon and Georgie’s loud complaining was cut off as the video ended.

_Tim: apparently Jon won out with “The Admiral” for a name._

“Aww… I hope they found it a good home,” Sasha smiled a bit, laser focused on the black-haired man. Clicking on the link to the old profile of one Georgina Barker, left abandoned sometime later that year, nearly every post referred to him as Gerry- but one post, seemingly from the day they’d met, had called him Gerard. Sasha thought that she had seen that name from somewhere…

_Sasha: keep an ear out. I’m cross-referencing something._

“You know, there’s this really weird article in the newest Cosmo…” Sasha said, digging into her canvas bag. She was careful not to take the files out of the bag, disguising the frantic search through Dominic Swain’s statement as looking for a magazine. She got to the page where Swain mentioned a man named Gerard, accused of murder, and an article that mentioned a dragon was part of the alibi that made it impossible for charges to be brought against him.

She said, “Damn, must’ve left it at home,” as she hid the statement again.

Tim said, reaching for a cronut he’d been steadfastly ignoring up until that point, voice injected with careful cheerfulness, “We’ll go together after work- have some fun,”

“Oooh, Mister Stoker- I’d love nothing better,” Sasha said, smiling. “But don’t get too cocky just because I’m saying ‘yes’,”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Tim said. Sasha was wholly absorbed with the laptop screen.

She searched for the murder of Mary Keay. _Morden Woman’s Body Found Mutilated and Partially Skinned, Ruled Suicide Amid Outrage_ blinked back at her from the screen _._ She skimmed through the article, reading only the bits that really caught her attention and bookmarking the rest for later. 

_… Despite its self-inflicted nature, investigators were hesitant to rule it a suicide…_

_… The primary suspect that would have allowed detectives to rule it a homicide was Gerard Keay, the victim’s son- however, he was purportedly in the Chelsea area at the time. This alibi is corroborated by video surveillance at the Magnus Institute, which showed Keay entering the building through a backdoor around the time the body was found, and by a dragon by the name of Jonathan Sims, who claims Gerard had been helping him clean up a mess made by another visitor._

_Gerard Keay could not be reached for a statement…_

_… Jonathan, who corroborated his alibi, nonverbally consented to an interview and is quoted as saying, “Gerry wouldn’t do that. Even if he weren’t with me at the time, he wouldn’t have done that.”_

_“Leave us alone,” Sims is quoted as saying before threatening legal action should the interview continue, “Just leave us alone.”_

“Well,” said Sasha, eyes gleaming with discovery, “would you look at that.”

* * *

When Tim left Sasha in the assistants’ room, saying he was getting a smoke break, she’d had a bit of a wild look to her eye. 

He understood, of course. Sasha was an intensive researcher- had to have been, to spend so much time with the walking horror story that was Artefact Storage for months and months and still live to tell the tale. It almost made him sad that she hadn’t stayed in Research, helping out and letting him see that intensely focused look more often.

But there was something that day that felt just the slightest bit off, when she’d been getting her hands on that statement. Something a little frightening, even, in how she merely saw a name and had the idea to connect it to one of the Institute’s many, many terrors. 

It was probably nothing. 

Tim had been feeling too on edge, recently. Between the job being almost incomprehensible and Jon’s motives being even more so, he felt like he kept repeatedly crashing into a brick wall. Felt like he was being watched, too, and not even necessarily by said boss anymore.

(Maybe it’d been kind of overkill, to pull a knife on their boss. It wasn’t so much Tim pulling the knife on Jon as it was Jon just more or less being in a place Tim hadn’t expected him to be and just so happening to have the knife with him, but it may as well have had the same effect if the look on Jon’s face at the time had said anything.)

(Tim had put the knife back the second he got into the Archives that morning. He wasn't sure how to apologize, or if he even should. Jon looked like the type that would get pissy if someone he didn't like was apologizing to him.)

He unwrapped a cherry pop and popped it into his mouth, swirling it around for a moment as he looked up from the concrete ground. It was kind of a cloudy day; the kind that in literary manuscripts that didn’t quite have their voices straight meant that it was time for contemplation and self-analysis. 

Sometimes, Tim missed publishing. It could be a little monotonous, but it also had a sense of narrative cohesion. He went in and read the manuscript, he edited or rejected depending on the sparks or lack thereof he saw, and then he thought about things like themes or symbolism. 

(Killer clowns generally did not do wonders for narrative cohesion. If Tim were still the Tim from back then, he’d probably have needed to have a word with whoever had written his life.)

“That’ll kill you, you know,” 

Tim glanced over to his right, hearing a door closing behind the owner of the voice. He rolled the lollipop around his tongue for a moment as he looked the stranger over. Tall, blonde, and full of fabric seemed to describe him aptly; even with some of his curly hair falling into his face, he had the kind of look of someone who was obviously middle-aged but still looked young despite it. 

Thank God someone was here, honestly- Tim had been dangerously close to some very protagonistic thoughts there. The last thing he wanted was to fall into the slippery rabbit hole of being anything like the kind of characters that cis men hailed as classical.

He pulled the candy out between two fingers and gestured a bit with it, smiling a bit, “Maybe so, but it could be worse,”

“I don’t know about that,” The man was soft-spoken, but there must have been some kind of echo to this hidden away space between the Institute and a large, concrete wall to a parking lot above because his voice rang a little too much. Sounded as if it was bending in on itself and overlapping. “Eat too much and it can be just as bad as a pack a day,”

Tim snorted a bit. “Don’t you have some kids to parrot that to?”

“Something like that,” said the man. 

“Huh. Nice,” Tim popped his candy back into his mouth, “those have gotta be a handful.”

“A bit, but there’s nothing you can do about it,” The stranger shrugged.

“Can’t say there is- I certainly wouldn’t be able to,” Tim commented.

The man tilted his head, the little pom-pom attached to his hat sparking a bit with the motion. He really was dressed too warmly, even if the December air was a bit chilly. “Is that so? You seem like you’d be good with those sorts,”

“Hah!” Tim laughed a bit, eyes crinkling at the corners, “Is that your way of saying I’d be a good second dad? That’s definitely a new one,”

“If that is what this flirting is, perhaps,” The man said. 

“You really are something, I’ve gotta say,” 

The man smiled, but it seemed just the slightest bit… weird. “Oh, you’ve no idea how correct you are,”

Tim shook off the feeling and pushed himself off the wall, offering a hand. “The name’s Tim Stoker- don’t think I’ve ever seen you around before,” He gave a little grin, and the stranger’s visible eye seemed to rotate a bit, seeming… bluer. A trick of the light, maybe, but it was enough to have Tim hesitating for half a second, wondering if offering a hand was the best idea. “... Something tells me I would’ve remembered a face like yours,”

“Michael is a name you may call me,” The stranger said, gripping Tim’s proffered hand too quickly and nearly enveloping his fingers. Out the corner of his eye and in the glass of the nearby door’s window, Tim saw the grin on Michael’s face was falling. 

Literally, he meant. Michael’s grin was falling off of its face. It looked drawn on, sliding down its chin hanging over its neck in a two-dimensional imitation of a noose. 

Tim managed to pull his hand away, rearing back a few steps. When he looked back up, Michael was just as normal looking as ever, despite what the jagged edge of its reflection in Tim’s periphery looked like. Michael said, laughing a little too softly-yet-loudly, “Oh, but Tim Stoker- you’ve dropped your candy,” It was true- it’d fallen right out of Tim’s mouth as he stumbled back.

“What,” Tim said, glad that he was able to keep his voice steady after the scare, “are you doing-”

“You had forgotten your soup,” Michael said, holding up a plastic bag that was just a little too shiny to be really plastic. 

Tim stared at the creature for a moment, at a loss for words. “... Pardon.”

“Your goulash,” Michael said helpfully, wiggling the bag a bit. It spasmed in a wholly unnatural way and sounded like a laminated bag full of stew. “You left it, assistant.”

“Oh,” Tim said, just staring. “... Thanks.” 

For a few seconds, he didn’t move to take it, and Michael stared at him expectantly. When Tim didn’t move closer, Michael set the bag on the ground, setting a piece of too-pristine paper on top of it. It looked like it’d shredded the paper itself. “My number.”

“Your number,” Tim said. 

“My number,” Michael, who eerily fit the description of the Distorted monster Jon had apparently been conversing with the day before, repeated. (Tim chose to think that this thing’s name being Michael, and one of its victims also being Michael, was just a coincidence, and not indicative of a worst case scenario.) Michael patted the top of the bag and stood, somehow having grown about three centimeters in the time between starting and ending its conversation with Tim. It was soon opening the door and leaving through it.

It was only then when Tim remembered that there wasn’t supposed to be a door there. And when he could will his legs to move, rushing forward, the yellow wood disappeared completely, leaving Tim alone in the narrow concrete space.

For a few seconds, he stared at the wall where the door had been. Then he stared at the bag filled with his container of goulash, allegedly. It seemed a little too full to bursting.

Yeah. He wasn’t touching that.

He crouched down and read off the number from the piece of paper, typing it into his phone. If nothing else, he could figure out what the hell this Distortion thing had wanted, and if it knew anything about Jon eating a version of it. Or maybe not the second thing, but Tim still wanted to test this and ask _something._

Instead, after a few rings, an all too human voice said over the line, “Lion Street Books- this is Herbert Knox speaking?”

For a few moments, Tim looked at the wall, thinking that yeah, this might as well have happened. Getting pranked by some kind of terrible monster, for unspecified reasons. He didn’t know why he thought for even a second that weird crazy monsters with distorted voices would have a cellphone in the first place. Unless there was some kind of secret meaning to this, in which case, he might have just been throwing away a bit of a golden opportunity. He’d have to keep this in mind, whenever he got the chance to look over whatever else Sasha was finding. She was going to want to know about this.

He bent down and picked up the paper, leaving the supposed goulash untouched.

“Sorry,” Tim said, “Wrong number.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter should be coming out September 5th :)


	4. Lonely Words and Looking Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which gossip is exchanged and Jon continues to be more cryptic than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: disembodied animal eyes, eye eating

Martin was feeling… a great many things, at the moment.

When they arrived Jon had told him and the other assistants that he wanted to meet them in the breakroom later that day, so Martin had wanted to get a start on the day’s tea and cocoa. At the very least then everyone would be nice and refreshed for it.

He was prepared to see Jon make his arrival in that noiseless way of his way of his, with a strangely graceful slinking gait that seemed to hide any audible trace of his presence. He was prepared to see Jon take the cocoa he’d made first with a casual thanks and a mouth too full of teeth again. Human ones, though Martin was pretty sure no human had quite that many molars. It was sort of endearing, actually, once Martin figured out that he was genuinely trying to make them look normal. (Jon had paused mid-conversation with him to correct the errors with a sort of self-admonishing look.)

He was _not_ prepared to see Jon fish a jar of animal eyeballs out of the fridge, use them to refill the container he’d kept on his desk, pop one into his mouth between sips of the warm drink. This time with the full set of fangs, Jon told him that the cocoa he’d made was really quite nice.

On the one hand, Martin wasn’t used to compliments at the best of times. He’d been underqualified for almost every job he’d held and the nerves he got as a result didn’t usually help, but he’d tried hard on working out the intricacies of making a nice, comforting sweet drink. (Perhaps a little too much so, he’d been really worried about the sweetness being overbearing…) Getting the affirmation from Jon was, _well_. He couldn’t help but feel a tentative rush of triumph that fluttered in his chest.

On the other hand, he wasn’t really sure how well the taste of a raw eyeball meshed with… well, with anything, really. God, Tim’s warning about there being eyeballs in the fridge was _not_ enough to steel him for seeing Jon actually eat them like meaty fruit gushers.

He was glad that Jon didn’t seem to be expecting a response, since between the initial shock from the sight and the knowledge that he was probably going a bit red in the face he doubted he’d be able to stutter out anything coherent. So he kept his face buried in the boxes of tea he was putting away and his eyes very keenly inspecting their labels.

Sasha and Tim were a godsend for coming into the breakroom when they did, chattering amongst themselves in their way that only two people who knew each other for ages or were otherwise mutually telepathic could. (Sasha was trying to make the argument that nothing could really live up to the coded nightmare that had been MySpace, but Tim was adamant that Tumblr had it beat.) He handed them their tea and gave the kettle a quick rinse as Jon made a hum of acknowledgement at their arrival.

“One moment,” Jon said, as his spine ridge unfurled from his back, as though the spots where his vertebrae were meant to be were merely the door to a line of mailboxes. Martin had to keep himself from jumping when a scaled tail he hadn’t noticed came from behind, brushing past Martin’s hip, and curled back onto Jon. The prehensile appendage reached between the bony plates and fished out a small folder of notes from the papers held inside one of the slots.

Mark that as another one of Tim’s warnings that didn’t sufficiently prepare Martin for seeing it in person. To be fair, he’d been a _bit_ preoccupied with what Jon was wearing in the picture and struggling to connect the animal print-clad dragon with the straight-laced man he’d been bringing cocoa for a while now. He wondered if he’d ever be able to get Jon out of the archives after hours- if he’d dress like that if they ever went out for, well, he supposed just sweets, and whatever else Jon liked to do in his free time.

 _God, of all the people, I catch feelings for the one who is undeniably strange and also my boss._ Martin thought, shaking his head to himself, _Clearly I’m not meant to survive._

He was brought back to himself by the sound of Jon clearing his throat and starting, “Right, then. Now that everyone is present, this meeting is to discuss the matters of your probation.”

That was one way to bring Martin’s attention slamming back to the here and now. Trying to ease the slight panic that made his heart skip a bit, he tentatively asked, “Um, wasn’t that still for two more months?”

“Yes, Martin. This is just to check in a bit on how it seems everyone is faring, so not to worry.”

 _Ah. Okay, then._ Martin relaxed slightly at that.

“Are you giving us performance reviews now? In the breakroom? I thought those were usually done in private?” Tim piped up. Jon seemed to bristle a bit at Tim calling it a performance review, but seemed to be trying to hide the discomfort. He instead flipped through the notes he’d just taken out of his ridge.

“You could call it that. I will make it light on individually directed comments though, and I’d just rather not have to repeat myself. Which actually brings me to something else I’d wanted to discuss.” Jon looked up from his notes and said, to the room at large but glancing towards Sasha’s general direction, “I will be making some changes to the archive’s organizational system.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow and said, “I thought you said Gertrude’s system didn’t need any revisions?”

“I changed my mind.” Jon kept a neutral expression, but Martin thought he could see an excited gleam in his eyes when it was Sasha that spoke up.

“So, are you going to tell us what those changes are?”

“No.”

On either side of Martin, Tim and Jon were stifling a groan and a smile respectively. Jon recovered his mask of professionalism first, though, and continued, “I do recommend you give your input on where the statements should be placed though.”

This time Martin spoke up, “How are we supposed to do that if we don’t know how these things are arranged in the first place?”

“After finishing up with them, place the statements where you think they should be stored and I’ll take it as a recommendation.”

Okay, _that_ sounded absolutely bloody ridiculous, even to Martin. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think Jon was joking, but he’d said it in such a concentrated, matter-of-fact tone, even as all three of his assistants were now staring at him.

“That- is that implying you’ll be moving all the statements we put down?” asked Tim.

“If I disagree with your recommendation, yes. Anyway,” Jon continued, steamrolling on despite none of the assistants -Martin was _sure_ it wasn’t just him now- being clear about what any of that entailed . All he could gather was that Jon wanted them to place statements in different places than where they found them, and there was no guarantee that it’d be left there.

“So far none of you have proven to be particularly egregious in terms of work performance,” he said, reading from the notes again, “although I would like to remind you to take note of preservation of the documents.” Martin winced at this, remembering the dog he’d let into the hallway that resulted in several soaked statements and Jon trying to pounce on it with his claws hidden.

“In terms of research and follow up you all seem to be doing a commendable job- though, Tim, I believe you used those cronuts I got to, uh, chat up some of the police? After work hours?”

Tim looked somewhat taken off guard. “Well, yeah, there were extra and they got the job done.”

“Mhmm. Ask me next time you’re- hmm, actually. Perhaps you could get something else in their place yourself. Keep the receipts and I can claim it from the work budget. That goes for all of you, in fact; please don’t hesitate to expend our resources for whatever causes you see fit.” Jon’s lip curled with some derision, “Elias doesn’t pay any of us enough, and I’m certain he can survive us siphoning what he owes. Employee wellbeing is part of a work investment, of course, not that he has the… foresight, or capacity for human compassion to genuinely consider such things.”

“…What?” Tim asked.

“You have free reign to use the institute funds how you see fit.”

“…You’re saying you want us to abuse the budget.”

“No, of course not. I trust you all to make perfectly sensible decisions that will have a direct benefit to our work.”

“Like… cronuts,” said Sasha.

“Like cronuts.” Jon agreed.

“Even if it’s just for us to eat instead of an investigation.” Sasha pressed.

“Precisely. I’m sure that brought good morale for all of us.”

Sasha’s eyebrows raised, “Wait, what were _you_ getting out of it? You said there was too much wheat in it to eat?”

“The knowledge that we were using Elias’ money for cronuts.”

Sasha nodded, taking a slow breath, “... Right.”

“Moving on. Tim, I’d advise that you keep your work light. We don’t need to be overexerting ourselves in this probationary period just yet.”

Tim’s expression of befuddlement hadn’t budged, and he responded in a small, strained voice, “I… uh… _did not_ expect to hear that from… _you_ …”

“I do appreciate your dedication to working after hours, and the eagerness to see these archives nicely organized. But, for now, it’s best you take some breaks. Within the archives or out, I’m sure there are locations in London that are worth exploring other than the dingy old alleyways. Same goes for Martin and Sasha,” Jon glanced over his notes again, but this time, kept his eyes downcast, “As for you, Martin, your work ethic has been lov- has been quite commendable. Perhaps you could follow after Martin’s example, Tim.”

 _Ah._ Did Jon almost call Martin’s work lovely?

Martin was dimly aware that Tim’s eyes were darting between him and Jon, but he felt the heat return to his face and kept his gaze straight onward.

_No Martin, it isn’t fair to Tim that you’re receiving praise for not having any prior experience to be able to try and set things right. It is clearly not okay to be happy about that, you can stay on track with this, I know you can-_

Jon was already making his way out of the room. Martin thought Sasha might have been asking Jon something, or maybe answering. Either way he was pretty sure they’d been dismissed already. _So much for staying on track._

“Ah…” Jon’s head tilted slightly as he paused on his way out. There was a silent moment where he merely stood as still as possible, eerily blocking the doorway. Then, he turned gravely towards the assistants, catching Martin off guard. “There’s someone here to make a statement. If, when she finds her way down here, you are the one to receive her, tell her to write her statement down, quietly. Under no circumstances is she to give it directly to me or speak it aloud within my earshot. Understood?”

Martin was willing to bet that none of them really completely understood _any_ of the events of this meeting. Everything Jon had told them was just one curveball after another. In fact, he was pretty sure that one of the duties of the Head Archivist was specifically to take statements, and as much as Jon seemed to want his assistants using company time to do… urban exploration? Maybe? He himself usually stuck to his job diligently and hadn’t opted out of any other sort of work. It was odd that this was something he would be trying to avoid.

Still, though, the sudden change in tone combined with the whiplash of the last few minutes seemed to have startled Tim and Sasha enough to not say anything, merely nodding along. With the intense stare Jon was levelling them with, Martin wasn’t about to say otherwise.

“Right. Good.” And with that, Jon turned and was gone from the room, leaving Martin, Tim and Sasha confused and staring after the door he’d left through. 

“... So that was a joke, right,” Tim said, eyebrow twitching, “For the most part? Maybe?”

Sasha rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder. Martin winced in sympathy. “Sorry mate- pretty sure you just got thrown under the bus,” Tim frowned at that.

“...” Martin awkwardly cleared his throat, trying to move the conversation away from… that. It was just a shame that Martin didn’t really know either of his coworkers as well as they seemed to know each other. “So, er, would anyone like any more tea?”

* * *

“Hey, uh, boss, I forgot to hand this to you after the meeting, here’s follow-up on the Ivo Lensik case.”

Tim hadn’t known _what_ to think for just about the entirety of that meeting, it began with regular annoyance when Jon had announced that he’d be rearranging the archives while giving a grand total of zero explanation of why, or how; and the thought process quickly devolved into a string of one question after another when he’d basically encouraged them to siphon the institute funds for themselves and told Tim to “take it light” on his work.

Between this, Jon’s attire the other day and the impressive spite in his eyes when he declared that Elias losing money would make his day, Tim’s new boss was proving to be absolutely bloody impossible to understand. It was beginning to grate on his nerves a bit.

“Thank you,” said Jon as he took the file in hand, flipping through it and glancing at Tim’s interview notes with Anika Suma.

“You met up with other residents at Hilltop Road to corroborate this?” There was a note of concern in his voice.

“Called in, mostly. Why, would that be another thing I was supposed to ‘lighten up’ on?” Tim couldn’t resist the jab. Like, hell, he’d been basically asked to not do his job, right? What job even does that? If this was Jon’s way to find a way to fire him, it was way too roundabout to work.

“No, this looks well-researched and I wouldn’t have you do anything otherwise- but I would advise that you take caution in matters involving the house on Hilltop Road. And to avoid ever going on site there.”

Great. More instructions that didn’t make sense.

Tim asked, “Right, what’s the deal with that? Any chance you’re going to be marginally less cryptic about this than everything else?” 

“It’s unsafe. This isn’t the first I’ve heard of that place, and while I’m not entirely certain what their ‘deal’ is, I don’t want you jumping into potential danger unnecessarily.” Jon said.

At least that was _some_ explanation. Although… “Isn’t that what we... do? We’re looking into spooky weird stuff, aren’t we always gonna have to run into potential danger at some point?”

Jon made a face at the word “spooky”. “Yes, I suppose so. There’s still a difference between potential danger and known threats, though, and at least until you’re certain that you’re staying in this line of work, I’d rather keep it to the former.”

“You said we weren’t able to quit anyway.” Tim said.

“You aren’t. But there are procedures that can be taken to let you leave. For what it’s worth, though, I hope it never becomes necessary, I…” There was a pause as Jon seemed to be turning something over in his head. “I rather like your presence here. I’d hate to lose you to... well, both workplace disagreements and external threats.”

“You make it sound like this is a bleeding warzone.”

Jon responded to that with nothing but a heavy-sounding hum, which definitely didn’t reassure Tim after that ominous-ass statement. After a few moments, he awkwardly nodded at Tim and turned to walk away.

When it became clear that Jon wasn’t going to say any more, Tim decided to pick up another topic, falling into step alongside Jon, “Anyway, wasn’t there someone supposed to give a statement? I didn’t see her come down.”

“Oh, she’ll be awhile yet,” Jon said, glancing at Tim, “Rosie is still telling her the directions to the archives.”

“Right.” Tim paused as Jon opened the door to his office and slipped in. Tim had only a few seconds to catch the door before it closed and slide in as he said, “Wait- if she’s still at reception, how’d you know she’s here to make a statement? Or that she’s here at all?”

“I heard her. I don’t usually try to listen all the way there, but-“

“Wait, wait- you heard her? From across half the building? I knew you could hear well but-“ Jon had heard her. Through several walls and over the bustle of all the other people currently in the institute, he was able to pick out that one interaction and know exactly where it came from. Christ, he and Sasha would have to be way more careful trying to sneak around investigating.

“As I said, I don’t usually engage in eavesdropping as that’d be impolite,” Jon said somewhat defensively, “But yes, I can pick up conversations throughout the institute. Individual footsteps as well, if I strain.”

“You say ‘usually’...”

“I try to pay more attention if I notice certain people of interest or potential ill will come into the building, and there are _some_ people who can’t stop poking their _needling_ little eyes into matters that aren’t his to pry, which I don’t see the need to extend that courtesy t-” Jon stopped, looking as though he’d bitten straight into a lemon, rind and all, _“Eeuuugh.”_

Jon’s words were cut off by his own long, pained groan, and Tim would have thought the mention of, probably Elias, one too many times a day was about to make Jon double over if he didn’t also part his lips into a sneer with a look of absolutely mortified disgust.

“Jon? Are you okay-“

“Yes. I’m fine, just. Hm.” Jon straightened up, scowling harder, “Speak of the devil and he shall begin to assault you with conversations about that horrible little marriage of his and his husband’s insistence that 4’33 is an appropriate piece to play on repeat at a wedding.”

_What._

“Wh- excuse me this is Elias we’re talking about, right? He’s _married?”_

“Not since last June and not before next April.”

Oookay, it seemed like they were gossiping about Elias’ love life now. Tim could get into this. Tim could _so_ get into this. “Oof, bouncing back from a failed union with a shiny new lover?”

“Oh, I’d hardly call Peter ‘new’.” It was amazing how much contempt could drip into a voice, “And there’s only so many times you can come back to the same person before it stops being so much ‘bouncing back’ and more of a doomed game of ping pong.” 

Tim barked a laugh at the wording, then caught something that gave him pause. “The same person?”

“Five times.”

“With ten-month divorces?”

“Give or take.”

“Christ.”

Jon gave a dry huff. “Stay at the institute long enough and you’ll find yourself exposed to a surplus of awful, unthinkable knowledge-“ Jon’s eyes widened again and he pulled another face. “Oh. Now he’s making a fuss about Peter threatening to cut institute funds if his family doesn’t get reserved seating to bail on.”

Oh, Tim was enjoying this, now, this was a right juicy scoop. “Funds? Elias’ on-and-off husband funds the institute?”

“Bastard’s been draping himself over the Lukases for money for as long as I’ve known him- although, I suppose _Elias_ hasn’t. At some point all he was doing was getting high behind the library’s filing cabinets.” Jon rolled his eyes at that. Tim could barely contain his delight. Elias Bouchard, once some stoner kid. It was going to give him fuel for weeks.

“O-okay, holy shit. Do you have info like that on everyone working here, or...?”

“Again, I try not to pay too much attention to anyone who hasn’t proven to be a pompous, meddling ass.” Jon glared at the candy jar full of eyes on his desk as he said that, which, a little weird, but Tim was getting into this.

“So, even if I did, _hypothetically_ , have a bunch of chocolate to share,” Tim said gleefully, “you wouldn’t be able to tell me if, say, Matt from Research actually _is_ trying to woo Laura with secret break room serenades to maybe use in a few bets?” 

Jon looked back to him, eyebrows furrowing, “Tim I am not going to let you bribe me into revealing your old coworkers’ romantic endeavors for gossip.”

“Just. _Hypothetically_ -“

Tim was cut off by a soft knock on Jon’s office door. Both glanced at each other before looking to the woman gently sliding open the door with haunted eyes. She was a pale-looking woman with long hair and an uncertain look to her as she regarded both of them.

“Excuse me. Is this the Archivist’s office? I’m looking for the Head Archivist,” Her voice was soft in a way that Tim was having trouble hearing, and he was closer to her than Jon was. “I’m here to make a statement.” Beside him, Tim could see Jon’s brow furrowing as he gave the woman a once-over and he seemed to be considering something. After a slight pause, he stepped forward.

“Yes- er- that would be me. Excuse me and my assistant for a moment, I- someone will be with you to take your statement shortly,” he said as he motioned for her to come into the office and led Tim outside with an urgent look.

Once they were in the hallway, Tim rounded on Jon.

“What was that?” Tim asked, “I thought we were supposed to tell her to write her statement down, ‘not speak it aloud under any circumstances’, all that?”

The look of apprehension didn’t disappear as Jon answered, “That’s the usual procedure, yes- As it stands, though, we’ll have to make an exception. With Peter Lukas still in the building, we can’t afford to make her feel any more alone then she already does.”

“What? What does he have to do with this?” Tim’s stomach dropped. Sure, the archiving job was already massively more atypical than any other he’d ever seen before, but... “... Is she in danger?”

“ _Yes_ ,” said Jon in a low voice with dead certainty. “I’ll explain after she’s safely out of the doors, but we don’t have time now. She needs someone to hear her out and believe her. And that someone cannot be me.”

“The ‘no statements within your earshot’ thing?”

”Yes, that’ll put her in a different kind of danger. I can leave the institute while she gives it but-“

“But you need one of us to take it.”

“...Normally I wouldn’t allow that, but yes.” Jon looked positively sick, as though even saying that took energy. “I’ll... tell you why that is later as well. After we make sure she’s no longer in danger.”

They were doing this, then. He still wasn’t sure how much of this was genuine and how much was Jon’s general weirdness, but... Tim gave a little sigh. “Right. Okay. You can count on us, boss.”

“Thank you. There are blank tapes in the second drawer of my desk. You can use them to record the audio.” Jon was already fixing up his vest, not seeming to remember a coat or anything similar.

“We’re taking statements with cassette tapes?” Tim asked, “Wouldn’t a computer be better for this?”

“Again, I’ll explain later. You should get on it. She’s waiting in the office. Call me when she’s done giving her statement.” Jon paused. “Though, if you feel at any point you can’t handle it, pass the intake to Sasha instead, alright?”

Tim supposed it could be a chance for Sasha to look around his laptop with the certainty that Jon wouldn’t be listening. Before anything, though, they to get this statement giver out of the supposed danger Jon was so sure she was in. “Alrighty, then.” 

* * *

“So, you believe me?”

Sasha ripped her gaze from the tape recorder and gave a sympathetic look to the woman sitting across from her. “Yes, Miss Herne, I think I do.”

She wasn’t just saying that to placate her, or just because Tim mentioned that Jon emphasized something about it being important that she was believed. No; after the stories of her former coworkers vanishing into winding mazes for days on end after touching the wrong artifact, she was sure that someone like Naomi, grief-stricken as she was, would’ve been especially susceptible to making a wrong turn that landed her in supernatural clutches. None the wiser, until it was too late.

And then there was the fact that Jon had apparently brought up the name Lukas before even hearing her statement. All that was missing in the picture was exactly why the Lukases had targeted her.

The statement itself had felt… all too vivid. Naomi had told her story well, for Sasha had the feeling of the creeping cold of the fog biting at her own imagination and at her physical heels. The whole walk in the graveyard had been doused in a mix of dread and despair, and if Sasha could feel that just from listening to it recounted, Naomi must’ve been much more rattled than they’d all initially assumed.

“We’ll look into the matter and get in contact with you to share what we can find. I’m afraid I’m sort of new to this still, but my boss seems to have some knowledge of the Lukas family and I’m sure with time we can help you better understand what happened to you. In the meantime,” she gestured to the carved granite stone on the desk, “would you like for us to take that off your hands…?”

“Yes, I- I feel like I need to stop looking at this, I thought it’d be best I kept it for closure but…” she trailed off.

“I understand,” said Sasha, taking the stone from her as Martin entered the office with a steaming mug of tea.

“You all done here, then? I made you some tea- it’s a nice chamomile. Maybe it can help take the edge off?”

“Yes, thank you,” as Naomi accepted the mug, Martin and Sasha exchanged a look. It was Sasha’s signal that Martin can show her to the breakroom and later back outside the dreary depths of the Institute.

As he began leading Naomi out of the room, Sasha turned her attention to Jon’s desk. It was incredibly cluttered, reflecting how he kept the rest of the archives. She took note of the items as she sifted through them- research notes, pen holder, little container full of what she now knew were definitely not jawbreakers after opening the lid- and finally uncovered Jon’s laptop, stored between a stack of photograph envelopes.

It was surprisingly compact, for a work laptop of someone who did most of his job in the office. Sasha wondered if Jon had done much travelling before coming to work in the institute. More questions with answers that probably laid in the laptop itself, she supposed, and got to work on attempting to crack the passcode. 

“All clear then, o loyal lookout?” She asked with a smile after a few minutes.

Tim gave a strangled yell at the edge of the door, peeking in, “Well, yes- only a very skilled and completely serious spymaster incoming.”

She kept her eyes on the monitor. “If I didn’t know you were so utterly capable, I’d accuse you of trying to sneak up on me.”

“Super-stealth is a _skill,_ Sash. You know I have to hone my craft!”

“In the archives where our boss can hear us coming several rooms away, right.”

“I got him out of the archives, didn’t I? Besides, he said he tries not to listen in on stuff, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t even notice us seeing him eat that inky blob monster thing.” He walked to the desk and leaned over onto what little space Sasha’s search of the table had cleared, “by the way, I think we might want to be extra careful looking into his stuff, think he has some major issues with privacy and whatnot. Doesn’t like people who pry.”

Sasha glanced up at him, giving a nod, “Neither does Matt.”

“That’s different! Matt doesn’t have spooky secrets all up in his arse- just beautifully embarrassing musical ones. What I meant was you should’ve seen how hard he was ripping into Elias on account of the old double boss getting in his space or something. _Wait_ till you hear about what he had to say about his wedding plans.”

 _Oh, boy._ “What did we say about speculating about Elias’ kinks, Tim?”

“That it deals psychic damage with me as its God-given conduit that shan’t be stopped?”

She rolled her eyes, “Tell me later.” Another attempt, and…. Yes! The laptop background of a very familiar orange cat curled up in what looked like… flames, came onto screen.

Thankfully, Jon was the type to make the passcode something sentimental, meaning that she didn’t really have to do much additional hacking. It took about three guesses to get to the right answer. The code had been a date: September 30th, 2008. The day that the investigation into Gerard Keay had been dropped. It was a bit of an odd date to choose for sentimentality, surely, but it also made sense in an odd way- a birthday or normal celebratory event was the first thing that anyone would guess. 

Sasha asked, “Tim, you’re sure Martin’s not going to call Jon back yet?”

“Yeah, told him I already called.” Tim grinned, “You should’ve seen the look on his face when he didn’t get to do it too- ever seen a moping angora rabbit?”

Sasha let out a slow exhale. “I can imagine- poor guy’s got it rough.”

“I mean it makes sense, with how our jobs are going. Must be the most welcome he’s ever felt at a new place in a while considering his qualifications.” Tim nodded.

“He told you about it too?” Sasha glanced up at him.

“Yep. Probably not affecting him as much though, considering how this place is…” Tim made a motion to indicate the whole statement-strewn archive.

If Jon was to be believed, it was about to be statement-strewn in a whole new way for a while, which meant that Sasha’s deciphering of the organizational system was going to be upended and pushed to square one. It could’ve been that Jon just had the habit of scrambling up the archives at a moment’s notice, but the pointed look he gave Sasha said otherwise.

No, Jon had almost certainly picked up on Sasha’s attempts at puzzling out the archives; and from the instruction to indicate where they thought the statements should be, it was either a way to wrangle a new, proper organizational system out of the assistants themselves, or it was a challenge of keeping up with the erratic changes on the fly. Sasha decided to take it as the latter.

It also meant that Sasha wasn’t surprised when they found nothing of value in terms of organization in a perusal of Jon’s computer files. If he was going off of memory and cryptic improvisation alone, it made sense that he wouldn’t have an outline of the archives detailed in his portable, very easy-to-steal laptop.

What they did find was an Excel spreadsheet divided into two columns, each containing names and phone numbers corresponding to both people and locations, with no indication of what they were for or the frequency of correspondence. It could’ve been written off as a mundane, albeit strangely formatted address book, until Sasha scanned their contents and noticed a familiar entry.

“Tim, that bookstore Michael made you call, was it…” she beckoned him closer and indicated the entry for Lion Street Books among the list of locations.

“Huh, yeah I think so. Let me see if the number’s the same.” He reached into his pocket and fished out a blank piece of paper, and then, peculiarly, started glancing between the screen and the paper as if seeing actual numbers on it.

“Uh, Tim?”

“Yeah? Yeah, it’s the same, look-“

He handed the paper over to Sasha, and she looked over it once again to ensure she didn’t just catch it at a wrong angle.

Still nothing. The paper was wholly blank.

“Come on, Tim, did you lose the actual slip? There’s nothing on here,”

Tim’s face twisted into a look of confusion. “What? No, it’s right-“ Tim cut himself off as he took back the paper and turned it over in his hand. “Huh.”

Sasha tilted her head, “You sure it’s the same piece?”

“Positive. I tried calling the number and everything, it couldn’t have just- Michael. The thing Jon ate called itself ‘delusion incarnate’ or something. It must’ve tampered with it, I _swear_ I-“

“ _Tim._ I believe you. It’s a good thing you called when you did, at least,” she let out a sigh. “God I hope this isn’t something we’re going to be taking to Artefact Storage.”

Grabbing a loose piece of paper, Sasha scribbled the number down, trying to memorize it as she went for good measure.

“We could maybe call again to double-confirm.”

“Confirm what? That they’re popular in the target market of really cryptic dragons and straight-up monsters?”

“…If nothing else, it’ll reassure us that the number was real, and that the place holds significance to both straight-up monsters and Jon.” And if all else failed and they ran out of leads, Sasha wasn’t afraid of potentially sounding a little strange if they went with the direct route of questioning.

Tim nodded. “Right. Okay, that sounds like a plan.”

They were about to close the tab and continue their search when another entry caught Sasha’s eye. It was an address of another bookstore at the very bottom of the column. Pinhole Books was crossed out and with a long of bolded question marks and apparently hastily typed swear words following after, blocked by the borders of the cell but expanding into a long record of frustration when Sasha clicked on it. If Sasha remembered correctly, it was the bookshop owned by the then-deceased Mary Keay; the mother of someone very close to Jon.

Tim gave a small sound of amusement. “Looks like the boss had some trouble getting his claws on a few books.”

“Mhmm.” Sasha wasn’t really sure what to make of that, but she felt it odd that Jon would be the sort to get that aggravated about some bad customer experience. The insistence that Jon had had in the article that “Gerry” would never kill his own mother crossed her mind.

Both the statements that Jon thought important enough to mark and protect, and now two bookstores he seemed to have activity in, one of which was directly connected to someone he had a relationship with. It seemed to all point towards books.

Still, the clock was ticking away. They pressed on and found a quick link pinned to the home screen that took them to an old MySpace page, and were immediately assaulted by a theming choice that was an amalgam of early 2000’s punk and eye-bleeding neon, which was a far cry from the thought of possible cursed books and completed probable murders.

“Jonathan Sim’s crap aesthetic sense strikes again,” said Tim, making a low whistle. “Sasha, I’m updating our bet on how old the boss is. I don’t know _how_ I’m updating it, but I am.”

Sasha rolled her eyes, “We never made that bet.”

“And shame on us for that!” Tim said, gesturing to the screen, _“This_ is something to stir debate over- the thrilling mystery of Jonathan Sims, and whether or not we’re operating under not one, but two unbelievably old weirdos as our bosses.”

“Two? Tim what _did_ he tell you about Elias?”

“You said to tell you later,” Tim scrolled down the page, seeming to find something interesting and making some notes of his own.

Sasha looked over at the tab. “Music?”

“Just jotting down the boss’s band preferences- if he wants us to ‘lighten up’, I’m sure as hell not passing up the chance to do it to My Chemical Romance, and I’ll know he actually _likes_ it.” He smiled a bit cheekily, “That explains the mug, huh?”

“Yes, oh, what a great mystery solved, the case of the mysterious institute band merch.”

“Hush, Sash, I’m doing important work here.”

Sasha rolled her eyes and left Tim to his scribbling, gaze coming to a rest on the statements she’d taken from the creaking shelves, still in her bag on the chair. She’d only had time to go over the Enrique MacMillan statement the night before, and thought that it would be a better time to compile all their intel tonight, after work. That would leave her the rest of the day to go over the Dominic Swain statement, with the possibility of Jon slinking around the archive much more frequently in the wake of his organizational changes.

Maybe it would be better if she went over it right here and now, while there was a lower possibility of getting caught. She took it out of the bag and turned it over. It seemed that it wasn’t marked as audio accessible yet, either.

“Tim,” she said, after a moment of deliberation, “do you think you can distract Martin for a little while more? I think I’m going to have a look at some files I got from the archives that Jon didn’t want us to find.”

“Aw, no fair! I’m the distraction while you get to do the super secret stealth reading this time?”

“If you wanted the illegal reading time you should’ve gotten the materials yourself, prick,” she smiled, “And I think Martin would want to take a look at that band list too. For _, bonding_ reasons.”

Tim seemed to brighten at that. “God, he’s going to be all over it. Alright, do you want me to go call Jon after I’m done laying his musical desires bare to Martin, or…?”

“I’ll go to you when I’m done. It’ll probably just take like... fifteen minutes.”

“Sure thing, Sash.” He gave a little two-fingered salute, and left the room with the music list in hand.

Alone again in the office, Sasha looked at the statement, and then at the tape recorder. They might as well have a version of the record on hand that didn’t include Jon’s chewing noises in the midst of it. She clicked on the tape and started reading.

“Archival assistant Sasha James, recording statement of Dominic Swain, about a book briefly in his possession in the winter of 2012. Statement begins.”

Beside her, the reels of the tape recorder whirred, while eyes from the open snack container on the desk rolled silently in their liquid prison, and watched.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Real sorry about delaying the update for a week, time is a whole bitch and we'll be trying to wrangle it better next round. Next chapter should be up by 3rd of October!


	5. Solid Stone and a Disappointing Absence of Monster Flesh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon goes hunting and then faces the consequences of his actions. One of those consequences is Martin and also gay. So really, it's less of a consequence and more of a happy surprise.
> 
> Sasha has been marked by the Eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: injury, attempted murder, near-decapitation, gore, body horror, grievous amounts of blood, and a few teeth falling out.

It was using the scent of cigarette smoke and cheap alcohol to cloak itself. It was a fairly good disguise, all things considered, with this section of Old Fishmarket Close being the kind of run-down that attracted unlucky drunks, but one that Jon couldn’t help but feel was out of place this time of day. He’d ended up leaving the Institute while the sun was still in the sky and was almost surprised that it was still there as he stepped out of the door, acclimating himself to the chillier air. 

Behind him, the Distortion stood, as bundled up as Michael Shelley had been before he embarked to Sannikov Land. Jon wished that “delusion incarnate” would deign to change its clothes into something less subdued. The bright neons of the farthest interior of its corridors were far easier to aim at.

Not that Jon would be aiming any weapons at it. It-Is-Lies also happened to be his ride. 

“We’re a bit closer,” Jon said quietly, mainly to try and ignore the literal daggers of the Distortion’s glare grazing the back of his neck. 

The Distortion giggled, “Think you’re rather colder, actually.” 

Jon didn’t pay the casual lie any mind, fishing in his pocket for a pack of Marlboro reds. It was a fair bit colder in Edinburgh, being quite a long ways north of London, but the cold was only a temporary distraction. He tugged the hood of his hastily thrown-on hoodie up to hide his face, frowning a bit at the disarray his hair would be in by the end. His hair would likely already be fairly messy as was by the end of it, since the streets here were just a little too narrow for him to comfortably extend to his full wingspan and take flight. The little alleys where the Anglerfish hunted would be even tighter. Even so, he’d been hoping to maintain some semblance of a neat appearance.

“I’ll be walking along this stretch to see what I see,” Jon informed the monster beside him.

“Yes,” The Distortion nodded, neck far more elastic in the middle than the rest of its head, “I know. I have seen you.”

“I mean,” Jon huffed out a breath, beginning to walk, “I need to look as though I’m  _ alone.” _

The Distortion replied, keeping in step just behind him, “That is also what I have seen. Your plans are not imaginative, Wishgranter.”

Jon was heavily reconsidering his stance on not eating humanoid entities. “I mean  _ go away,  _ Michael.”

“I am already away,” The Distortion said ominously, and when Jon glanced over his shoulder, it was, indeed, about half a kilometer behind. From this distance, it was even harder to see the little details where that marked it as something Distorted- a lie told so expertly that Jon might have, in other circumstances, been worried by his perceptions lying to him.

“You do know that doesn’t actually work after the fourth time, right?” Jon called after it.

Michael slowly slid partway into a door in the mossy concrete wall, directly speaking into Jon’s ear despite the distance, “I am awayyy….”

Jon just shook his head and turned back to the road dipping below him. Some places near the left wall of moss-covered stone tops and the buildings beyond were falling partially into shadow and disarray. If Michael messed this up due to wanting in on the “sport”, Jon was going to peel it, paper mache skin and all. 

The trap itself was easy enough to lay. Jon made remarkably good bait, so long as no one caught a glimpse of his teeth- and even then, he’d Googled some anatomical diagrams before coming, so he was fairly certain he had the correct number this time. He slowed down a bit and made it seem as though he wasn’t entirely sure how to walk in a straight line as he took out a lighter and lit his cigarette, already preparing for the hell of a headache he was going to get later. Like most things for humans, nicotine did not tend to agree with him.

It was a bit of a ways downhill from where the Distortion had dropped him off, but soon enough, he was finding his way to the approximate site where Nathan Watts had found the Anglerfish. He’d at first considered only coming at night to recreate the scene of the disappearances- and if he didn’t find anything there, would likely find time to do so. However, Sasha’s digging had revealed the number of attempted kidnappings around the area had been steadily increasing, even though the disappearances had been a little more sporadic between the years of 2005 and 2012. 

Jon was beginning to suspect something a little more amiss, and he had a small feeling it had to do with a certain gorilla skin. He wouldn’t feel secure about this until he opened Gertrude’s storage and burned the scraps of the damned thing himself.

He heard something shifting. There was something there; enormous and laying dormant in wait.

Jon slowed down as he glanced to his left, hearing the gentle scratch coming from an alleyway just ahead. Catching sight of the shadowed space, Jon carefully tripped himself, stumbling forward as though panicking at the loss of his footing. He landed on one knee, hands flat on the ground, and cigarettes tumbling out of his pocket. He took just a little too long to pick them up, watching out the corner of his eye as something shifted in the dim space directly beside him. Growing up where everything watches did not stop the ill feeling that crept into Jon’s stomach when he felt eyes on him.

The voice that followed was low and slurred, trembling as a timbre that scratched up Jon’s spine. The Eye might have prided itself on pulling everything out of whatever unlucky victims fell to it, but it always missed something; some detail deemed just a little too insignificant for the wealth of fear it was looking to drink in.

_ “Can I have a cigarette?” _

There was something in the alleyway. Perfect.

“Hol’ on,” Jon slurred right back, holding up the act for the moment. The ideal way to go about this would be to get close enough to take a clean bite somewhere fatal. It likely wasn’t going to go ideally, but he was going to help his chances wherever he could. “H-Hold on a sec, lemme jus…” He stumbled onto his feet, hair falling into his face as he turned to look.

_ “Can I have a cigarette?”  _ The figure swaying there was human enough, seeming to levitate just slightly off of the ground. 

“Got some here,” Jon muttered, taking a step forward.

The blank face was unfamiliar to Jon, but if he had to guess, it would make the most sense if this creature used newer skins as a lure. What struck Jon was the sheer damage to the skin; scars latticing up from the tattered shirt collar and up its neck, marking the side of its face. It appeared damp and sunken, as Nathan Watts had described, but more than that, it appeared to be worn through. 

_ “Can I have a cigarette?”  _ It didn’t seem to mind that as Jon approached, he seemed to have his fair share of damage himself. With his diet, it was impossible not to end up scarred. It could be that the Anglerfish was looking for a new lure, but that merely brought up a more disturbing possibility.

For some reason, the creature was trying to pull in more skins. And if the anglerfish were pulling in more victims, and if its previous victims had been affiliated with the gorilla skin, then that meant that the Circus of the Other was on the move.

The lure continued the sway as Jon pretended to stumble into the trap, listening to the gentle creak of the great wooden frame that held the weight of the rest of the anglerfish in the strange darkness beyond. At least he knew this much: this might delay the building of some part of the ritual for a spell. Letting out a puff of smoke that didn’t come from the cigarette, Jon slowly held it out, as though unsure. He was close enough to see the hand on the lure’s waist. Jon’s fangs began to slide out.

_ “Can I have a cigarette?”  _ The lure asked, mouth unmoving.

“By all means,” Jon said, eyes narrowing at the form behind the lure. Before the lure’s dampened arms could wrap around him, Jon quickly ducked underneath. 

Then he launched himself at the anglerfish and bit into the juncture of its neck. 

Calling it a “neck” was frankly too generous. It had all the give of a handbag and exploded with the taste of old blood, coating Jon’s tongue in blackened decay as it gave a whirl of clicking metal. Jon dug his claws into an approximation of its sides as he tore as much of its throat out as he could manage, trying to keep a hold on it. If things were merciful, that would have been the end of it; Jon would have felt the creature go limp and would have been able to drag it away someplace to be finished off in relative peace. 

Unfortunately, near-decapitation tended not to mean anything to a Stranger. Neither did regular decapitation, for as much as he tried to finish the job and swipe the creature’s bulbous head from whatever configuration of a dozen shoulders it had, it simply wouldn’t detach. The Anglerfish moaned in pain as it jerked itself back from Jon’s claws, giving a mightier hiss of steam as some of its body was torn clean through. Not enough of it, though. Not nearly enough. 

There also wasn’t nearly enough space between Jon and the Anglerfish as it lurched forward from under him, an obscene number of spindly three-jointed arms reaching to try slicing away skin and whatever else it could cut. One of the hands with its fingers pressed tightly together into a single pointed weapon managed to spear his right shoulder before he jumped back. Jon hissed, forcefully tearing the limb out of him despite its “fingers” trying to bloom on the way out, scraping some of the meat off of his shoulder along with fabric.

Before Jon could try and attack again, he felt the tight hold of thin leather straps clamp shut around his midriff, holding him in place. The skin on the lure was surprisingly firm no matter how flimsy it might have appeared and Jon’s arms were pinned to his sides. His head tilted back to catch the glint of flat, rectangular teeth in an undulating mouth opening wide in preparation of sanding Jon down, and he took a deep breath.

Jon didn’t have nearly enough fire to do anything dramatic like burn out the alleyway but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t do damage. He spat out as much fire as he could manage, watching the burst of orange fly into the creature. The Anglerfish gave a splintering howl of slowly melting metal and he was suddenly losing his footing, head slamming back against the ground as the lure threw Jon away. The Anglerfish began to retreat.

Jon barely had time to process the patchwork of slimy eel’s skin draped across the cobbles like the fabric of an evening gown before it was slithering away. He scrambled up to give chase, ignoring the way the back of his head throbbed as he tried to reach out to tear the creature’s head the rest of the way off. It slipped through his fingers, hanging onto its neck by the barest of straps. 

Its lure brushed past with the faintest touch of wet leather as it began to retreat further into the alley and Jon cursed. From somewhere above Jon, the Distortion gave a hearty laugh, slapping something together with a wet  _ crunch  _ of leaves being stepped in. 

“Try using your wings!” Michael encouraged, settled somewhere a few stories off of the ground, “See if that will give you a boost, Wishgranter,”

Jon grit his teeth and ignored the Distorted figure, knowing damn well that if he tried to unfurl his wings here, he was definitely going to get stuck. 

Old Fishmarket Close wasn’t the ideal spot for a chase, and Jon suspected that was precisely why the monster had chosen the place. Plenty of drunken walkers. Lots of places to hide and avoid being perceived. Very few places for anyone chasing it to maneuver. The Anglerfish retreated further into the alley, sticking to the walls so that Jon would have little to glimpse of its bloated body as he tried to keep pace. Just as it seemed he would  _ finally  _ catch up it took a sharp turn before packing itself into a broken window with the snap of lumber breaking. 

Cursing under his breath, Jon quickly skid to a stop and peered inside. There was almost no light, save for the faintest beams shyly poking through the thin slats between wooden boards. Though he could hear the creature break and reform with the hushed slide of leather over an inanimate frame, he couldn’t really see it all that well. To really see it meant coming in closer. 

A few stray shards of glass caught on his sleeve as he climbed into the window, trying to keep his footsteps as light as possible on top of the crunch of stray gravel. His eyes still needed a moment to adjust but he still knew where the monster was clumsily crawling away, pushing itself further inwards in an attempt to hide. There was no sound that Jon hated more than the squeak and warp of a tanned hide, but it lent itself well to being heard. The Anglerfish was pushing itself further and further in a corner, so much so that Jon had to imagine that it was trying to push itself into a smaller skin.

When he finally was close enough to see more clearly, the Anglerfish had seemingly disappeared. All that was there was a man hastily pulling the skin of his arms up, the now skinless lure draped over its elbow as a featureless torso and head. Jon recognized it, and as he looked, the face became more illuminated by the gentle lick of flames curling out the sides of his own mouth.

“Doctor Hector Ainsel,” He muttered, more of an acknowledgement than anything else. “Or is it just the skin?”

The Anglerfish seized up, peering up at Jon and the fire still held at bay. His eyes were quick and darting, moving just a little too easily in the wonky framework of a skull the creature had molded itself into. It was still far too human for Jon’s liking. 

“... You,” The voice was raspy and slightly wrong. It also sounded far too much like Sarah Baldwin- possibly switched up the voice boxes somewhere in the mix. “What-  _ are you,” _

“I think that should be obvious,” Jon said, baring his teeth. A few on the left side were starting to get loose, meaning he was probably going to lose them fairly soon. “I know you have the skins,”

The Anglerfish pressed further back, moving carefully so as to not trip over its hastily pulled on skin. “I- I do  _ not  _ know what you-”

“The first victim was Jessica McEwen, 2005,” Jon continued, taking a step forward and raising his right hand, making sure his claws were far from hidden, “with quite a number of others between her and who I assume was your latest. Doctor Hector Ainsel, working in the Gosport Hospital ICU before a rather tragic accident and subsequent disappearance some weeks later, just last year- quite a few were looking for him. You’re getting sloppy.”

“Stop that,” The Anglerfish hissed, pressing further back as Jon advanced on it, “You can’t possibly know me. Don’t you dare act like it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t particularly care  _ to  _ know you,” Jon’s lip curled in disdain, “That’s the Beholding’s lot. I’m just here to ask a few simple questions.” He dug his claws in the wood beside the creature’s head as he asked, “What sort of ritual are you planning on starting without that taxidermied skin, exactly?”

“ _ A few simple questions.”  _ The Anglerfish shot an acidic glare at him as it gave the retort, “doesn’t sound all too different from the Beholding’s lot to me.”

Jon gave a frustrated huff. “Just answer the question.”

“Why should I- you tried to rip my head off!”

“If you’re so desperate for us to go back to eviscerating each other, take off the skin and we can get right back to it,” Jon growled out, making sure the smog rolling out of him was hot and noticeable against the creature’s face. “Failing that, just answer the damn question so we can  _ both _ get this over with. What do you think you’re doing without the taxidermied skin?”

The Anglerfish went eerily still, eyes darting to the clawed hand beside it and turning towards the open window. Then it hurriedly met Jon’s gaze again, wide eyes boring into his face. “... There is a skin,”

“I know there isn’t,” Jon said.

“... Robinson,” The Anglerfish breathed, “That damned biddy- she’s been talking then, has she? Even after she burned so much of the Choir-”

Jon did not mention that it had actually been him who had torched most of the Choir. For some reason or another, this creature had yet to make the connection between Jon and Gertrude Robinson. “Gertrude Robinson?” Jon asked, feigning ignorance, “What’s some old woman to do with it? She’s been traveling around for a while now, hasn’t she?” 

The Stranger creature looked up at Jon with something approximating fear coloring its glass eyes. “.... She isn’t at the Magnus Institute?”

“Not for some months,” Jon said, “On the move, it looks like.”

“You’re not going to kill me,” It muttered.

“Haven’t decided yet, actually,” Jon said, gearing up for further interrogation, “Answer me this- this Choir you’re rebuilding. I suppose you’re using them to recreate the costume of the  Danseuse Étoile.”

The Anglerfish then suddenly relaxed. The previously taut expression loosened, skin pulling back into a gummy smile. (So Jon’s guess was wrong, then.) “You truly are clueless, aren’t you?” 

“I know enough,” Jon said, and he was genuine. If they couldn’t use the skin from the Anglerfish’s victims, that would mean that they likely would still be shopping around for a costume of special distinction. Or else they already had. In which case, “I know where it is. The replacement for that taxidermied skin.”

“No you don’t,” The Anglerfish outright grinned. “because  _ we don’t have it,”  _

Jon hissed out in pain as the creature stabbed straight through his side with a shard of glass, likely filched from the window. He probably should have seen that coming, he mused, hearing the Anglerfish scurry past him and toward the open window. Jon made no move to follow, taking a breath and holding a hand over his side to stall the bleeding. The Anglerfish’s footsteps retreated and blended into the triumphant squelch of skin flying out. After counting down from ten, Jon turned toward the window and sighed, lamenting that this hoodie was absolutely ruined by now. 

“That was no fun,” The Distortion complained, frowning at him from the sole opening to the boarded up building. “You didn’t even  _ try  _ to chase that which isn’t.”

“I don’t see you offering to go after it,” Jon groused, looking around for someplace to sit. There were still a few unopened crates of materials around, solid enough to hold his weight. 

The Distortion frowned harder, a move that made Jon’s eyeballs vibrate gelatinously. “You are the one capable of eating it- I would just have skin with no use.”

“Well, I didn’t want to eat it. That’s all.” Jon said.

“I am disappointed, Wishgranter,” Michael continued breezily, causing several bits of debris to spasm near the windowsill where it was sprawled. “It would have been very easy for you to kill it, in the form it took.”

“There isn’t a dragon alive that would willingly eat a human,” Jon said, already feeling a headache coming on. At least some of it must have been from the nicotine earlier.

The Distortion’s eyes rolled back around its eyebrows before settling back in its sockets. “You are not a good liar, Wishgranter.”

“It’s not a lie. At least, not for me, it isn’t.” It was true unless his magic had created said humanoid entity. No statement imprint was ever really human. Then again, his circumstances were so out of the ordinary that it was bizarre- as far as he knew, he was the only dragon in existence with this particular diet. 

“I do not believe you know what a ‘human’ is,”

“It had human skin- close enough.” Jon ran a hand through his hair before wincing, remembering the stickiness of gluey black rot clinging to his fingers. He already had a fair bit covering his mouth and chin, and now he’d just added more to his hair. The most he could say was that at least he hadn't gotten more than a bruise on the back of his head; no extra blood was falling, and he didn't really feel concussed. When he got back to the Institute he had a fair bit of cleaning up to do before meeting with his assistants again. He was about to say as much when Michael spoke again, voice oddly quiet.

“The Archivist would have wanted you to do it,” The Distortion said, catching Jon off guard. There was an expression on its face that was hard to parse, with the neutral lines of its eyes and mouth blending into each other. “You do not like to disappoint the Archivist,”

“...” Jon slowly took a breath before letting it out. “Be that as it may, if she wanted to make sure I did, she wouldn’t have left without so much as a word or way to contact her.” Which was quite the problem, when Jon had some fairly damning news about the activities of the Circus. A possible world-ending ritual in the making was one hell of a time to administer one of her damned tests. 

“It is not in your nature to refuse,” The Distortion said.

Jon said, “And it’s not in yours to care about logical throughlines, now is it?” 

Both of them stared at the other for a long moment. Jon waited for the monster in front of him to say something to dispute it, but instead it just sat there on the broken glass without breaking eye contact. After another heavy moment, Jon sat wearily on the closed box of old supplies and fished into his hoodie pockets for some of the wet wipes. “In any case, we should leave soon. Once I get back, I’ll probably be looking for a way to contact Gertrude- so you’ll want to be scarce.”

Michael gave a sudden, bitter laugh. Jon’s eyes narrowed. “What’s so funny?” 

The Distortion’s grin widened so far that the razor sharp corners speared its cheeks. “Oh- calling the Archivist. I am sure that will turn out.”

“I’ll have a few choice words for her,” Jon muttered, “So it had better,”

Michael grinned wildly, “I’m sure she’d love nothing better than to hear it.”

* * *

“You wanted to see me, Mister Bouchard?” 

Elias leaned back in his seat, looking for all the world as if he was entertaining a pleasant distraction from his work. Sasha couldn’t say why he felt the need to look like that when he was the one who called her into his office in the first place. Bouchard had always had a somewhat arrogant air about him- no more than any other old-money beaurocrat, but arrogant nonetheless- but now this was just getting silly. 

It didn’t help that her head’s been aching ever since she took Naomi’s statement; since she’d recorded Swain’s statement, and then decided to record a third after Tim said he couldn’t reach Jon. 

“Indeed,” Elias said smoothly, giving a benign smile, “I had just wanted to check in on you, now that you have the sense of what working in the Archives will be like. I trust that Jonathan hasn’t been trying to make things too hard on you?”

“No more difficult than the job requires,” Sasha said carefully, setting her intertwined hands primly on her knee. Sure, Jon had set the Archives up to be almost unnavigable, and was trying to make it more so, but she also didn’t really want to fuel the Head of the Institute’s apparent specist streak. “I’ve been making headway in deciphering the organizational system and Jon has decided to allow us assistants to recommend how to organize it.” 

Elias hummed, watching Sasha for a long moment. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, but she held Elias’s gaze, not willing to back down. She continued, “He did have something very strange to say about our working, though,”

“Oh?” Elias tilted his head slightly, “Is that so?”

“He said he couldn’t fire us and that we weren’t able to quit.” 

“Well,” Elias said, eyes crinkling at the corners, “he always has been rather… protective.”

“His exact words were that we weren’t  _ able  _ to quit.”

That seemed to give Elias pause. His eyes seemed all the more keen as they focused on her. “And why do you think that might have been the case?”

“I’m not sure,” Sasha admitted, searching Elias’s face. It was still in that mild expression, as though he were entertaining something mildly interesting brought to him by a child. She was exhausted. But, she didn’t want to show that, least of all to  _ Bouchard. _ “But it certainly seems to be an odd word choice if it was meant to be a threat, don’t you think?”

“Certainly. Although,” Elias leaned forward a bit, “if you were to ask me, that may simply be due to inability on Jonathan’s part. I’ve known Mister Sims for quite a long time, and articulation has never been one of his strong suits.”

“Hm,” Sasha could feasibly see that as an explanation, but at the same time, it seemed strangely… inconsistent. Jon could be snappish and overly pedantic, but he had never seemed the type to threaten unless truly necessary. Even the threat of firing was an odd one. Had he been solely looking to strike fear into the hearts of his hapless subordinates, then surely he would have just said that he would fire them without elaborating on there being a strange set of circumstances relating to it. 

“I can assure you, however, that Jonathan Sims has no recourse to fire you. I’ve made sure to close any such loopholes on the administrative end,” Elias continued, “So rest assured that you three will still have a job, even if you decline some of what may be asked of you,”

Sasha’s eyebrow raised. “Decline? Now, why would we do that?”

“It is heartening to see that you are eager to do your job, Miss James,” Elias gave a tight-lipped smile, “However, I should warn you that Jonathan Sims has a certain… tendency, to ask his assistants to complete tasks that amount solely to busywork. He appears to be less inclined to have an organized Archive and more in the business of using Institute resources to investigate… well.” Elias shook his head. “You’ve only been there for a week. I shouldn’t worry you about such things- my apologies.”

Oh, this was definitely baiting. Elias was trying to bait her about something. That meant that he almost certainly knew more than he was letting on about why Jon was trying to keep the Archives disorganized. She pretended to bite, saying with surprise, “Oh? You don’t have to hold back on my account,”

“Oh, but I fear I may,” Elias said, voice dripping with apology, “I wouldn’t want to strain any working relationships, if I could help it,”

“We can just keep this between the both of us, then?” Sasha asked hopefully as though she wasn’t going to tell Tim about this the next time she saw him. “I’m rather good at hiding what I think, you know- have to be, when you’re a woman in this field,”

“That is true,” Elias nodded in acknowledgment, as though considering. “Well, if that’s the case, then there’s no harm in telling you. I’ll be honest- I don’t know what exactly Jonathan is investigating.”

“Really?” Then why make it seem as if he did?

“Truly,” Elias said as though he were truly very sorry about that, “Though, I believe it may be something… dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?” Sasha pressed.

Elias leaned back in his chair, taking a measured breath. “Well. Dangerous in the way that it appears that before he officially became an assistant to Gertrude, while he was completing his degrees, he had come in as an intern, of sorts. Miss Robinson might have taken him as similar to a grandson or something of the like, because she spent plenty of time hiding his off-record investigations… And in those years, the remaining two assistants’ of Miss Robinson’s died.”

“That’s horrible!” Sasha gasped, resting a hand over her chest. “How…?”

“In separate, yet oddly similar accounts of arson,” Elias said before shaking his head. “But, you mustn’t misunderstand; I am not saying that Jon specifically had to do with them. All I’m saying is that he grew close to my Archivist at around a time of great tragedy.”

“And you were worried about Miss Robinson being taken advantage of,” Which Sasha didn’t understand in the slightest. If Elias was worried, then it was likely that he was underestimating the old woman. After all, if Sasha hadn’t met her before, it might have been easy not to see Gertrude Robinson as the stone cold bitch that she was. 

“Yes. And I believe that Jon was using Miss Robinson to garner access to further whatever his studies appear to be,” Elias said, and it dawned on Sasha that it might have just been a possibility that Elias didn’t know what Jon ate. Knowing that Jon ate statements and apparently couldn’t eat human food made Jon’s attempts to access the Archives logical; he needed to eat, after all.

“I see…” Sasha said.

“I caution you to be careful, Miss James,” Elias said, “I believe that you may be our most promising employee yet- I would rather you stay in one piece.”

“Of course, Mister Bouchard,” 

The meeting wrapped up, and as Sasha made her way back down to the Archives, she thought over what Elias told her. She thought over the possibility that Elias was telling the truth while Jon lied, and then the possibility that Elias was lying while Jon was telling the truth, and then a mix of both and neither. But still, one question was plaguing her.

How could Jon eat outside of the Magnus Institute?

(And a second- just what was the ringing between her ears whenever she thought about those statements?)

There were still too many unanswered questions to make a definitive case one way or the other, but Sasha wasn’t about to trust any of what Elias had said so easily. As she walked down the stairs toward the assistants’ room, she held on tightly to the metal railing, watching as her vision began to swim in front of her. It was suddenly oddly difficult to walk, and she took her time going down the stairs, resolving to leave figuring mysteries out for when she told Tim about everything.

As she stepped foot in the Archives, Sasha began to think back to Naomi Herne’s statement. About the fog that felt like it curled around her ankles, and about the stone still at her desk. She could still feel the cold in her bones even now, and with the momentary distraction of reporting to Elias gone, there was no ignoring how her head felt stuffed up with cotton.

She was still holding onto the doorframe when Tim glanced up from his desk, beaming at her. “Sash! So how’d it go with-”

There were black spots in Sasha’s vision when her knees buckled. Muzzily, she remembered how recording Macmillan’s statement had felt, after she hungrily tore through the one about Ex Altiora- about the feeling of earth weighing down on her shoulders, and the word the statement giver was tormented by.  _ Dig.  _ She’d have a lot of digging to do

“Oh,” Tim breathed, holding her up. When had he gotten up? “Hey, I’ve got you- you back awake with us?”

“Tim?” Martin said distantly, “Is something going on…?”

“I’m- fine,” Sasha said automatically, clutching the doorframe that had slipped out of her grasp momentarily as she tried to hoist herself up. Just what in the hell happened there? “Just got a little dizzy there,”

“Looked like you were about to pass out on us,” Tim frowned.

Sasha smiled at him reassuringly, using her free hand to steady herself on his shoulder. “Just been a long day- once I sit down for a bit, I’ll be fine,”

Tim slowly let go of her shoulders and took a step back, hands still hovering in the air for a moment as though preparing for her to take another fall. “You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Sasha said. On one of the adjacent walls, there was a door opening, and Sasha glanced at it momentarily. Yellow wood- it clashed horribly with the muted tones of the rest of the Archives, but all things considered, she shouldn’t have been surprised by the lack of taste. She turned back to Tim, holding out her hand, “I might need help back to my seat, though?” Not really, but Tim was hovering. Best to make him feel better.

“Of course! I’m here to serve,” It was said with a little wink, but sometimes, Sasha almost thought that Tim might mean it when he says that. She tended not to dwell on that because usually it led to certain emotions that she would rather not deal with when sick.

Just as Sasha was sitting down, she heard Jon say, “I take it that your meeting with Miss Herne went well?” Tim sucked in a breath above her, but she didn’t pay it any mind for the moment.

“About as well as it could have-” Sasha stopped up short when she looked up at Jon. Jon, standing on the other side of the room in front of a blank piece of wall, was absolutely covered in blood. He stood far too casually, holding a hand against his right side while his left shoulder bled straight through the pastel pink hoodie he’d thrown on earlier. She didn’t want to know what in the hell Jon had on the corners of his mouth. His clothes were ripped through in several places and he looked just as tired as Sasha felt. 

Dropping the papers that he had been carrying, Martin croaked out a strained, “Oh my God.”

“Right- well, you’ll likely be feeling some fatigue,” Jon continued, as though coming in looking like pure hell was normal procedure, “Live statements tend to take a lot out of humans, which is why we have the policy of writing statements down. You should be fine by the end of the day-”

“Jon, what happened to  _ you?”  _ Martin got out, suddenly crowding into Jon’s personal space. Sasha tensed, watching Jon raise a clawed hand and… do nothing of note with it, trying to step out of Martin’s path. “No, stay still- Christ, you really need to get that off-”

“It’s nothing to fuss over,” Jon frowned, trying to back away towards the hallway with his office. “I was just following up on Mr. Watts’ statement. It went remarkably well, all things considered.”

“You managed to get yourself mugged and it went remarkably well?” Sasha questioned incredulously.

Jon sniffed, “Please- no, I was not  _ mugged.  _ I just was hunting for the Anglerfish mentioned in Mr. Watts’ statement, and after I found it… er… It- might be best to spare the details-”

“You know that makes it worse, right?” Tim asked, gripping the back of Sasha’s chair. “Like, going after enormous unknowable monsters and getting fucked up is  _ worse  _ than getting mugged, you realize.”

“I’m getting the first aid kit,” Martin muttered, turning toward the break room.

“I already have one in my office- I’ll just patch it up myself,” Jon insisted, eyes darting toward the door. “You lot can get back to work without worrying further about this.”

Martin ignored him, saying over his shoulder, “Tim, sit him down- thank you.” 

“Aye-aye,” Tim quickly moved toward Jon and took him by his uninjured shoulder, leading him to sit at Tim’s desk for the time being. Surprisingly enough, Jon let him.

“This is insubordination, I’ll have you know.” Jon huffed, but didn’t try to remove Tim’s hand off of his shoulder. No matter how easy it would have been with the wickedly sharp claws still out on each hand. “I told you I would  _ handle  _ it!”

“Just like you apparently handled that Anglerfish,” Sasha said archly. 

Jon’s lips pursed, but before he could say anything in rebuttal, Tim sighed and grabbed the cobble that Herne had left behind. “Wouldn’t you say this rock seems a little spooky, boss?”

“‘Spooky’ is a terrible word for it and you aren’t subtle,” Jon glared up at him, looking at the piece of stone in Tim’s hand. It might have just been because Sasha was still apparently  _ recovering  _ from taking the live statement- she was going to have to ask more about that- but it almost seemed as though the thing was emanating cold. Jon gently picked the thing up and turned it over in hand. “... But it does have quite the sense of the Lonely coming from it, to answer your question.”

“There, see! You’re-” Tim was cut off when Jon unceremoniously bit into the stone like an apple. The sound of teeth on rock was horrible. It was made even worse when Jon casually caught two of his sharpened teeth, which fell out, in his hand. Sasha decided not to question it. 

“Well, I for one was feeling  _ quite  _ hungry, so,” Jon said after swallowing a mouthful of literal gravel, “thank you,”

Tim on the other hand continued, “.... You know, I was expecting something a little different to happen.”

Sasha mused, “A man’s got to eat,”

“I mean, with the teeth,”

“That’s meant to happen, actually,” Jon said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He set the teeth in his pocket and pressed his hand back against his side, nursing his lunch like one would any kind of soft fruit. Sasha was running out of comparisons. Her brain was not in fit shape for metaphors.

“Of course it is,” Sasha teased, “Get on the same page as the rest of us, Tim,”

Tim looked up at the ceiling for a moment as though appealing to some higher god. No God would listen to him. Taking in a breath as he sat on the nearest desk, he asked, “Not that I don’t love some cheeky bants as much as the next guy, but- is now… the time?” He glanced at Jon, “Your shoulder-”

“It feels fine,” Jon said. “.... I mean, as fine as it can. I’ve had worse.”

“Well that makes it all better then-” Tim was interrupted with Martin rushing back into the room, a large white kit held under one arm and gloves slid over both hands. Sasha hadn’t even known there was a first aid kit of that size in the break room.

“Alright,” Martin announced, “Shirt off,” Sasha was honestly proud that he managed to say that without stuttering, even though Martin seemed to be fighting quite admirably to hide a mean blush. He was failing miserably, ears going so red that it was a miracle they could still be distinguishable from his hair.

Jon coughed heavily, then cringed when he apparently moved his battered body the wrong way. His skin was flushing darker in turn. “H-Here? No?? Why in the hell would I do that!”

“Because you’re bleeding like hell?” Tim suggested. 

Martin glanced over at Tim and Sasha as though he’d completely forgotten about their presence. It was entirely possible that he had. Going redder, Martin said, voice cracking halfway through, “... Actually, we can- we- can go into y-your office? Instead? Just so it’s not--”

“No, that would,” Jon cleared his throat, “That would be fine, if you’re going to continue to insist on this,”

“I am,” Martin said firmly. Jon sighed and slowly raised himself from the seat, giving a tiny pained sound under his breath as he did so. When he and Martin ambled off to the Head Archivist’s office, he was still nibbling on the remaining half of Naomi Herne’s “lonely” stone as though trying to savor it.

Both Sasha and Tim watched them leave. They heard the resolute click of the door closing, and Sasha sagged a bit in her seat, pressing the heels of her palms against her eyes. “... Well. That is one hell of a situation.”

Tim didn’t say anything for a long moment, just looking off down the hallway. Then, he said quietly, “Hey, Sash? Do you remember where Nathan Watts’ statement happened?”

“Hm?” Sasha blinked, “Edinburgh, if I remember correctly. Is there anything…” Her eyebrows furrowed as she sat up, hands falling away from her face. “That’s seven hours from here.”

“Fourteen, if it’s a round trip,” Tim said, “and he’s here after three.”

“That…” shouldn’t be physically possible. Even with Jon’s wings, it was highly unlikely that he could fly so fast as to make it to Edinburgh, apparently go hunting, and then  _ fly back  _ while injured. “... makes it sound like you might have seen something more?”

“Remember the door I told you about?” Tim asked, leaning closer.

“The one with tall blonde and monster- yeah,” Sasha’s stomach turned, already suspecting what Tim was about to say. 

“ _ Jon _ just walked through that thing’s door.”

Sasha glanced at the blank piece of wall that once held the ugly yellow painted door and a shiver ran up her spine. She said, “... We’ll have a lot to talk about after work.”

* * *

The thing that threw Martin off guard the most out of everything was just how many scars Jon had. 

It’d been one thing to see the picture of the dragon in a crop top with fishnet under it; black lines making the discoloured swoop of scar tissue less noticeable. Like this, though, under the fluorescent lights of the Head Archivist’s office, they seemed to at least brush every piece of skin. A Lichtenberg figure snaking up Jon’s left side. Three jagged marks across his stomach, as though from claws. Strange holes, snaking in a strange pattern around his sternum, as though from some sort of insect, and even then there was more…

“I think this side might need stitches,” Martin said idly as he gently dabbed antiseptic over the wounds. As though the enormous chunk of skin peeled from Jon’s shoulder wasn’t the thing that worried him immensely. 

Jon huffed gently. “It doesn’t. I should know; I’ve gotten deeper,”

“That doesn’t help your case,” Martin said. It looked like the blood wasn’t coming any more, which was a relief. That cardigan Jon had been wearing underneath the hoodie was beyond saving, unfortunately. 

“It does so! You just haven’t been around long enough to get used to it,” Jon growled suddenly when Martin swiped over a particularly sore seeming spot. Martin didn’t really pay it that much mind; if Jon had really wanted to hurt him, he wouldn’t have put his claws away.

“That it, then?” Martin asked, reaching for the bandages, “We’re just supposed to take this all as some kind of normal thing, to see our boss get himself clawed up by something spooky?”

Jon frowned, “It’s not  _ spooky-” _

“That’s not the point,” Martin said sharply. He really didn’t mean to be snippy, but at the same time- it was just worrying, was all. He’d only been down here a week and things that already didn’t make sense were making even less sense. Even worse, it seemed to be causing people to be  _ genuinely  _ hurt. “Is this kind of thing usual for you? Going out and getting into monster fights?”

Jon seemed to shrink back at that a bit, deflating. There wasn’t much to deflate in the first place; he was already unnaturally thin, stomach concave to the point where the bottom of his ribcage was clearly defined through the skin. If it weren’t for Jon’s… eating habits, Martin would have worried about him not eating enough. “Not  _ usually,  _ no. I…” He took in a sharp breath as Martin began to apply the dressing, “I- prefer to avoid fighting if I can. But with so many more disappearances-”

“Right,” Martin said tersely. Great. Some kind of self-sacrificial streak- Martin had honestly thought that was just a stereotype about dragons. It probably still was and Jon was just like this, which somehow made Martin even more anxious. “And why didn’t you tell us?”

Jon winced, “The trip was… somewhat impromptu, I admit. I’d planned on going this weekend, but I needed to be out of the Archives, so-”

“You decided to go- alright,” Martin said, “Alright. I guess I can’t- say anything against it? Since this is a thing you did. Arms up,”

“It’s not so bad- I heal a little faster than most, so,” Jon held his arms up a bit so that Martin could tie around him, “you  _ really  _ don’t need to coddle me,”

“I’m not  _ coddling,” _

“You do realize that you don’t actually need to use that many bandages after the bleeding has stopped, right?”

Martin tacitly didn’t acknowledge that and moved on to cleaning up the wound in Jon’s shoulder. If his neck was feeling a little warm even while he was tying the bandages, then that was no one’s business but his own.  _ Of all the people in this Institute,  _ Martin thought to himself,  _ Of all the people in this enormous institute… _

Jon stayed quiet for the rest of the dressing process, biting his lip to choke down any little sounds of pain. Martin wished he wouldn’t do that- but what else could he do? He was honestly surprised that Jon was even letting him finish this, instead of just shooing him out and patching himself up behind a locked door. He could be glad for small miracles then, as he was packing up the first aid kit to bring back to the break room. He’d have to buy a few new supplies for it-

“Thank you,” 

Martin blinked, startled, as he glanced at Jon. Jon was looking at his hands, now free of the blood and old decay that had coated them, hair falling in waves over his uninjured shoulder. Martin wished he could say that his voice was calm as he said, “Um- it’s- h?”

“Just- thank you,” Jon said awkwardly, stubbornly not looking in Martin’s direction.

“Right,” Martin breathed, trying to collect himself, “Right, well- you’re welcome. Just don’t give me any more reasons to patch you up soon, alright?”

“I’ll try,” Jon said in a way that implied he was not going to do that whatsoever. 

“Good! It’s good that you’ll try,” Martin started towards the door, “Now, I’ll get some hot chocolate on,” 

“Right,” Jon said as Martin closed the door behind him. 

Right. Martin resolved not to think about how stupidly pretty Jonathan Sims was on his way to the break room kitchen. He absolutely did not think about it to the point of passing by the assistants’ desks and seeing nothing off about Sasha sleeping face down on her desk with Tim’s jacket draped over her shoulders. He especially was not thinking about it as he was putting away the first aid kit.

If Martin found an odd bundle of papers hidden in the compartment with the first aid kit, flattened as though left underneath the supplies for quite some time and yellowed with age, then that also didn’t have anything to do with Jon. Nodding, he resolved to deliver the notes and olden letter to Jon alongside the hot chocolate and went to work. 

And he was not thinking about Jon for even a second of it. 

_... Dammit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking a bit on this one- but, on the brighter side!!! We've switched to a bi-weekly schedule on this one, so our next chapter will be going up on October 24th, along with a little project focusing on What the Girlfriends and post-blinding Melanie! Hope you enjoyed :)


	6. Intermission [Past the Date of Expiration]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Clara von Closen sends a nice letter to Jonah Magnus, a few lurid lesbian affairs are brought up, and the first tape recorder clicks on.

To our dear Jonah,

It is my greatest hope that this letter finds you in good health. My husband speaks so readily of your pale face and lily-white hands that I fear the shadow of pestilence haunts your door, among all manner of other hauntings that you appear to invite. 

At the time in which I write this letter, the first chill of autumn has begun to set in. Fields of early morning dew have given way to the crystalline frost. The view shining outside of my window is painted in the broad strokes that accompany novel words; as well as the words in a novel, many of which I have been using to fill my time as of late. There have been many treasures that have blown in with the sea, and while I have remained inland for much of my longing, there is the occasional merchandise that makes its way to us. 

It is in these moments of stillness as I write that I cannot help but long for the times when my husband had brought me to the Frisian shoreline. I am sure you might well remember your evenings in Norden, if not for my husband’s persistent distraction; the soft light of lanterns lining the cobbles against the backdrop of the saline harbor, foaming white. The sparse foam dotting the waves follows me even still, decorating the outside of my window sill before the sun melts it back into the sea, far from my sight.

If I were to go off of Albrecht’s words, I might say that you might be in a similar state. Both of us are lovers at heart, certainly, and lovers have certain needs which need be met. Your heart must warm, my husband makes it seem, to know how divine and fair you are held even when you flutter so far out of reach. The next time that a story moves you across the channel, perhaps we might meet without the pale spectres of your fellows and speak more to it. 

I beg your forgiveness if there be any ignorance to my statements- whether they be ill will, illness, or the grim march of your murder of blackened stories ill-met at the door, the result appears the same to me. The means appear similarly. I suppose that when consorting with one so full of ghosts, I have no choice but to cloak my words in the veneer of the holy.

I shall resist the temptation to cushion my words further. Though I am but a daughter of Eve, still yet repentant and creeping alongside the limb that holds all the poison of mortal sin, there are matters in which such delicacy is undue. No matter the make of that which you cloak yourself, I believe we are both aware that you are not so delicate as my husband thinks, nor so diaphanous as to faint away into the grasping London gales. 

I will address the matter vis-a-vis your previous letter to me, delivered so very secretly and so very warily away from the eyes of my husband. Let this response come to you similarly hidden from all those which you already hide beyond the veil.

Your accusations are true. I have taken a mistress.

There is a part of my soul that itches to see your face upon reading my brazenness, although the larger part of it yearns for such a thing to never more cross my sight. My husband has shared with me how you loathe to be proven wrong, and I imagine that my remaining unconcerned was not the hypothesis that you put forward when threatening me. 

It is a rather incriminating statement, I must say; “I have a mistress,” is a difficult sentiment to dispute. Yet despite that, it is not how I would describe the manner of my relationship with Aarushi. Were I to describe the camaraderie that warms me better than the tea shared between us, one might more readily believe us merely friends. Were I to describe her beauty in as much detail as I have burned into my memory, to describe thick ebony curls and full lips, to wax and wane about the delicate, strong hands of a seafarer, one might more readily call it misplaced jealousy. Therefore, the word choice is deliberate; Aarushi and I are, beyond all doubts, involved.

I believe I have made it abundantly clear that I do not trust you. I send this information not out of a misplaced sense of loyalty nor a foolish show of bravado. I have no misconceptions about what you like to do with information, Jonah. 

As such, knowing that you so love to know, I will disclose a few further pieces of information I believe you would like to hear. I might tell you that Albrecht keeps the passwords to all his safes as the same combination; or, perhaps, I might write about the wonders of my husband’s penmanship, so fluid and beautiful because he rewrites his letters if even a single stroke is out of place. I might still yet continue and say how he carelessly tosses aside the rejected letters, and how when he writes to you, the pile grows three-fold. I might still tell you of how I have taken to helping my maid with the chores, as of late, and how dearly she thanks me when I hasten to clean my husband’s study. 

And what words are on those pages! I might tell you of many failed attempts to articulate the desire to run with him to a summer home, far from prying eyes. I might tell all about the gifts he has thought to promise you, or vile stories of evil he has tried so very hard to collect from all those who come into contact. Perhaps I could tell you which he does not send, thinking them to be mere folly. Perhaps I could tell you instead about all the ways he desires you. 

Trust, Jonah, Albrecht desires you in every way you could conceive. I suppose there is a reason why some things are considered sins of the flesh; for there is no end to the flesh that Albrecht desires of you, nor is there an end to the ways he wishes to taste, to scent your sweat-soaked skin, to look upon your ivory expanse. 

There were eighty-two ways, in fact, that I have counted his passion for you across two hundred and thirty seven letters. Not all of these letters were written by my husband.

I am aware, of course, that your accusation would well ruin me, particularly with this letter to add to your repertoire. However, I do not tell you this with the sole purpose of protecting myself. To do so would be to discount the enormity of the situation we find ourselves in, seeing as we both have similar goals in mind. 

You wish, Jonah, to keep me out of the way so that you have greater access to Albrecht’s library and scholarly resources. I wish for a way to bend Albrecht more easily to my imploring for more regular trips to Norden and other such villages along the East Frisian shore. These goals need not be mutually exclusive. I know how particular our Albrecht is in his choice of meeting place, and I know that you have yet to convince him to stay within our estate for more than a few days. 

For how careless he is in private, you must find him to be far too cautious in the public eye for your liking. He cares for your reputation more than his own, I believe, and yours is such a precarious reputation already with your occult musings; but having one’s best interests in mind do not a consistently easy manipulation make. 

If you would like to continue this little game of yours, the benefits are two-fold; both of our convincing Albrecht to use Norden as a common meeting place is for my benefit as well as yours. I invite you to try and find better evidence, if you begin to feel the stirrings of fear for the enormity that my husband has unknowingly gifted me. After all, your words as well as Albrecht’s paint such a lurid picture already. I would not blame your nerves in the slightest. 

I await your correspondence, my dearest and most laborious of acquaintances. Until such a time, I hope that you are content to have my blessing for yourself and Albrecht; may the coming frost remain outside the dominion of your joined fire.

You may have my husband’s eyes, Jonah. If you keep quiet you will have more besides.

With love, 

Clara von Closen

  
  


* * *

Trudy, get your letters. 

\- J

~~

Jeanine,

Thank you for retrieving them; the insight into Albrecht von Closen was interesting, if ultimately not what I was looking for after all. It is appreciated. As was his wife’s correspondence, though not to the same degree. Her affair, while also interesting, does not appear to tie into our current investigation. Is there any reason why you took the Madam’s as well?

\- G

~~

Trudy, 

Clara von Closen is technically my mother. I will likely still be in Scotland when you finally get around to reading this, and as such I expect no phone calls regarding the subject when you finally do. I know you to be patient enough to wait until the return of that which you suffer so dearly and allow me to settle back in. 

Much love, J

~~

don’t pretend you’re too tired from scotland. my office  **ASAP**

_ No ❤ _

* * *

[INT. MAGNUS INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES, HEAD ARCHIVIST’S OFFICE]

[TAPE CLICKS ON.]

**JONATHAN**

-rather interesting in the context of how the Archives were set up before I came on board.

**MARTIN**

Which- uh, which bit? The letter from the 1800s just sort of being left hidden in a false back, or that they kept… evidence?

[JONATHAN SNORTS WITH SOME DERISION, LAUGHING IN A “ARE-YOU-SERIOUS” WAY]

**JONATHAN**

_ Evidence?  _ I hardly think this is a crime scene-

**MARTIN**

I mean!! I don’t know! Why would they just keep these around? Seems like a weird thing to keep, is all.

**JONATHAN**

I  _ suppose  _ it’s a tad odd, but… perhaps there’s a reasonable explanation. Perhaps one of them needed help remembering why the letter was important.

[SOUNDS OF MARTIN VOCALIZING THE INCREDULOUS EQUIVALENT OF PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM, VOLUME OF A CONE]

**JONATHAN**

What? What’s so funny?

**MARTIN**

I- I’m sorry but this seems like the kind of thing that would be a little hard? To forget? 

**JONATHAN**

How would I know? This was in the 70s! They’d been around for a long while!

[A PAUSE AS JONATHAN CONSIDERS THIS]

**JONATHAN**

Or, Gertrude was. Jeanine had been-

[JONATHAN IS INTERRUPTED BY THREE POLITE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR. HE IMMEDIATELY GROANS. A THUNK SIGNALS THAT HE HAS HIT HIS FOREHEAD LIGHTLY AGAINST THE DESK IN FRONT OF HIM, AS MARTIN JUMPS SLIGHTLY.]

**MARTIN**

Er- I could... get that-?

**JONATHAN**

Don’t bother. If he really wants to come in, he’ll let that be known.

[THERE ARE THREE MORE SLIGHTLY LOUDER, INSISTENT KNOCKS. AFTER A PAUSE, ELIAS ENTERS THE ROOM WITH AN AIR OF BASTARDRY AND A SIGH OF BUREAUCRATIC DISPLEASURE.]

**ELIAS**

Jonathan.

**JONATHAN**

James.

[ELIAS FROWNS AUDIBLY.]

**ELIAS**

That would be the name of the former director, if you would remember correctly.

**JONATHAN**

You can’t blame me for not keeping track. All of you really do blend together. Perhaps you should pick someone who doesn’t have the same face?

**ELIAS**

Perhaps  _ that _ is a conversation better left for less polite company. 

[ELIAS SEEMS TO BE GESTURING TO MARTIN. MARTIN SEEMS AUDIBLY MORE TENSE.]

**MARTIN**

R-Right, Mister Bouchard.

**JONATHAN**

What do you want, Elias? I’d rather you not pester my assistants for longer than necessary.

**ELIAS**

Your assistants, hm. Rather interesting thing to say for a man who threatened to burn me alive if I sent them down.

[THERE IS A HISS WITH A SHRILL UNDERTONE, LIKE THE STEAM RISING FROM A KETTLE.]

**JONATHAN**

We can revisit that, if you’d like.

**ELIAS**

No, thank you. Since you appear to be in a mood, I’ll keep this brief- I believe you have a few documents that belong to me.

**JONATHAN**

Half the bleeding institute belongs to you.

**ELIAS**

A letter, John.

[JONATHAN GIVES A BARELY SUPPRESSED GROWL AT THE SOMEHOW PRESENT MISPRONUNCIATION OF HIS NAME]

**JONATHAN**

It’s  _ Jon,  _ and you’ll have to be more specific.

[THERE IS A VAGUE NOISE OF ELIAS-CONTEMPT.]

**ELIAS**

A letter to Jonah Magnus. 

**MARTIN**

Oh! U-Um, from? Would it be from Clara von Closen, by any chance-

**JONATHAN**

_ Martin. _

**ELIAS**

Yes, actually. I believe Martin found it. 

**JONATHAN**

How did you know M… [A SIGH] There’s another fucking painting in the Archives isn’t there.

**ELIAS**

I haven’t the foggiest clue what you mean, John.

**JONATHAN**

It’s  _ Jon  _ and yes you do. That stupid mass-produced portrait of Jonah Magnus.

**MARTIN**

Uh. My apologies but- but um, I’m a little lost?

**JONATHAN**

Not now, Martin.

**MARTIN**

What does a painting have to do with anything?

**ELIAS**

Nothing, I assure you. It’s likely another one of John’s s flights of fancy.

**JONATHAN**

Oh for the love of- you’re not getting your letter back. 

**ELIAS**

And whyever not?

**JONATHAN**

My predecessor already went through all the trouble of stealing it.

**MARTIN**

What- stealing?! This was actually  _ stolen? _

**ELIAS**

I’m afraid so, Mister Blackwood. [WITH THE SOUND OF PUT UPON SORROW] And it’s a family heirloom as well… 

**JONATHAN**

Yes, on my side of the family. 

**ELIAS**

But I was the owner of it.

**JONATHAN**

I’m still keeping it. Is that all?

**ELIAS**

Difficult as always, I see. [SIGH] I’ll go through other channels to retrieve it, then. Martin.

**MARTIN**

… Yes?

**ELIAS**

If John ever gives you trouble, feel free to come to me. I’ll leave you gentlemen to your work- which I expect to be  _ done,  _ Jonathan.

**JONATHAN**

Get out of my office.

[SOUNDS OF THE DOOR OPENING AND CLOSING AS ELIAS EXITS. JONATHAN HUFFS.]

**JONATHAN**

Martin, do you remember where the fireproof tarps are?

**MARTIN**

Yeah, but- but are we just not going to… acknowledge that? Or acknowledge that Elias didn’t ask about- about all of… [HE GESTURES TO JON, WHO IS STILL VERY INJURED]

[JONATHAN STANDS WITH A SMALL SCRAPE OF HIS OFFICE CHAIR]

**JONATHAN**

I need to burn out the newest painting’s eyes, so no. 

**MARTIN**

What? Wait-

[SOUND OF DOOR OPENING AS JONATHAN LEAVES. AFTER A LONG MOMENT OF STANDING IN STUNNED SILENCE, MARTIN SHAKES HIS HEAD.]

**MARTIN**

I swear to Christ… if he doesn’t explain this after probation…

[CLICK OF THE RECORDER TURNING OFF]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed that bit of an intermission! We'll be updating again on November the 7th, so look forward to it ;)


	7. Spiders and Words Unspoken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha and Tim continue investigation into Jon's possible background and Jon keeps Martin from going to Carlos Vittery's flat. The nature of Michael and Jon's dealings continue to be more complicated than they appear.
> 
> The Distortion begins making friends with archival assistants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TWs: spiders + eating spiders, gaslighting and emotional manipulation

“He took the painting-  _ what?”  _ Tim exclaimed at the same time Sasha asked, “You’re  _ sure  _ he said he’s related to her?”

Martin tensed at the sudden interest. At any other time Tim would’ve wanted to slow down, tell Martin to pace himself, but he was a bit busy trying to process the jumble of information that had just been dumped in his lap. It fit together about as well as the fever dream that was Jon’s idea of casual fashion and he was just expected to integrate it with everything else he knew. He’d just wanted to refill his water bottle at the breakroom, maybe have a chat with Sasha, but Martin’s arrival bearing the gift of more Jon-based incomprehensibility was already a lot.

“H- He definitely said it belonged to his side of the family, yeah, a- and, uh, the note from someone named Jeanine? Said that Clara Von Closen was ‘technically her mother’?”

Sasha made a small noise of amusement, “Can see why he wanted to keep it then. If  _ my  _ ancestor pulled one over an old cheating white guy to elope in a forbidden lesbian romance I’d want to hang onto it too.”

“Oh, I, uh, not really sure about the ancestor part, really? Apparently the one who called Clara her mother was having a romp around Scotland in the 70s,”

Tim sort of wanted to shake them. “Guys, as much as I genuinely would love to talk about how our boss’s maybe-ancestor-maybe-grandma told ol Jimmy Magma to stick one up his arse, why the hell aren’t we addressing how he spent work hours specifically burning off a painting’s _eyes?_ Am I the only one who thinks this is weird?”

“The painting with the eyes burned off is…ominous.” The tail end of Sasha’s sentence went a little softer as she seemed to be contemplating it.

Tim crossed his arms, leaning against the countertop across from Martin. “What  _ is  _ it with him and eyes, honestly. Gets a bit creepy, you know?”

“No, I do not know,” Martin responded quickly, frowning, “It  _ could _ just be another dragon wish thing,  _ Tim.  _ Maybe he can’t help it and it’s part of what he was assigned.” Martin was pointedly not making any eye contact with him as he said it. “And he seemed to know what he was  _ doing,  _ put a hand on me to tell me to stand back and everything- I wouldn’t call it  _ creepy _ , just…”

_ Here we go.  _ “Are you about to say ‘ _ Hot’ _ ?” Tim raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Martin. He shot Sasha a smile as she threw a stray tea bag at his shoulder.

“I- mmph _ \- No-“ _

“Look, beyond just  _ asking  _ him- and I’m not sure if we even should, might be rude- we can’t know for sure what his deal with eyes are, alright?” Sasha interrupted Martin, leaving him to faff slightly. “What we  _ do  _ know is that the painting was of Jonah Magnus, and if it’s a vendetta against the person rather than the eyes it does show a pattern.”

“Just doesn’t like the ones in charge of the institute? Might explain him being hung up on the firing thing,” Tim said, then made an uncomfortable connection between that and the picture burning that he’d rather not entertain at the moment.

He took a drink from his water instead and almost had a spit take when Martin followed up with, “Elias did say Jon threatened to burn him if he sent us down- oh, yeah, I think Elias was the first to call it a family heirloom. He might be on the other side?”

“Martin,” said Tim, suddenly focusing in on Martin, “Martin I need you to clarify- you ‘think’? That Jon might actually be related to him? Are you absolutely certain that that was what they meant, because  _ holy shit?? _ ”

“I mean if two branches of his family had dealings with the Institute’s founder and-slash-or became Head of the Institute, I guess it’d make sense that he literally lives down here,” Sasha said. She was slowly tapping the counter as she said it, and Tim recognized it as something she did when she was distracted between more than one line of thought. “Even if he and that Head hate each other’s guts.”

As Martin rushed to clarify that he didn’t  _ know _ , there was a lot going  _ on,  _ Tim was entertaining other ideas, and hopped off his spot at the counter. It was time.

“Archival Assistants of varying and colorful opinions of the bossman, we are  _ making  _ this bet, here and now,” he announced. “Ten quid on whoever gets closest to guessing whatever age produces the baffling, ominous,  _ objectively hot  _ likes of Jonathan Sims: Go.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “You  _ do  _ realize he could probably hear us, right?”

Tim smiled, “We only need to avoid him for as long as we need to get our guesses out. I’ll go first. Kinda batty old academic, maybe a hundred twenty? Old enough to have known old Jack Magnet as he was hatching.”

“You think an Edwardian would dress like  _ that?  _ Please. I’d go 22 or something, considering all his socials.”

“Sasha, I get the sneaking suspicion you’re not taking this seriously,” said Tim.

“I’m just saying! The spirit of the modern former MySpace user is to find a shirt that physically hurts to look at and unflinchingly add that to his wardrobe,”

Tim gave a dramatic sigh, “Ten more quid for me then, I suppose- unless. Martin, what do you think?”

Martin wrung his hands before answering, “I… actually I think he might just be around how old we are? Like, sorta thirty-ish? Give or take. Look, I think he knows what he’s about, okay? You could give him a little more credit-“

“Martin you’ve got to admit,” Tim started, “setting fire to a painting in a  _ very flammable  _ archive sounds a  _ bit  _ batty-“

“It was safe, okay? I would’ve stopped him if it wasn’t- he even used those fireproof tarps and everything-“

_ We have fireproof tarps? _

Sasha seemed to be wondering that, too. “Where did you find tarps in the archives…?”

Appearing a little put off by the change of subject, Martin shrugged. “Noticed them in a compartment in the wall behind the filing cabinets in the corridor closest to his office when I was, uh, looking for a follow up file I lost? There’s more compartments like that around here too, and some behind the panels of the kitchenette drawers, I think- I was digging around for exact teas, and…”

Tim locked eyes with Sasha. More compartments meant more potential knickknacks to be uncovered, and Sasha’s eyes seemed to spark as she brightened up with the possibility of new secrets. Her excitement was as infectious as it was cute. 

“Martin,” Tim grinned, “you have  _ got _ to show us where all these compartments are.” 

* * *

Jon didn’t very much like spiders.

He didn’t like the stringy, clingy texture of them as he trapped them between his teeth; didn’t like the reminder of his first terrified dealing with actual, non-statement created monsters and the digestive troubles that followed it; and he  _ especially  _ didn’t like when they skittered off from the ink they spawned from faster than he could trap them.

The latter had unfortunately happened on his lunch break that day, which resulted in him searching frantically around his office for the escaped offender with the papers of Carlos Vittery’s statement strewn on his desk.

All in all, he was not having a good lunch. At least he managed to remember to end the recording and shut the tape recorder off this time. He’d like to stave off more complaints from students listening to them hearing “extended sounds of angry dragon cursing”, thank you very much. Apparently he’d been slipping enough with the frustrated growls that they recognized him as a dragon on tape. Tough for them.

He’d just about cornered the damned creature as someone- Martin, from that shifting noise- knocked on his office door.

“Give me a  _ moment-!” _ He called, somewhat tetchily. He wasn’t about to let his sight of the spider escape him, not now, and he  _ definitely  _ couldn’t have an open door while the spider remained free to escape into the rest of the archives. Using his tail to thump the wall on one side of it, he batted at it as it skittered in various directions until he finally,  _ finally  _ managed to pin it with a claw through the abdomen.

“Right then, you detestable ass,” he mumbled, as he cupped the spider tightly between his palms and called for Martin to come in. He’d have liked to wait until after taking care of the spider to let Martin in, but with the size of the thing and the amount of fear it’d brought… well, Jon was guessing this meal would be a surprisingly loaded one.

“J- Jon?” Martin entered with a bit of uncertainty, “I’m sorry- is someone else in here with you? I’ve uh- I’ve got those interview notes with the Angelas I lost.”

The soft clink of china and Martin’s gait told Jon that he was probably carrying hot chocolate, along with a great deal of paperwork. Jon kept his eyes on the creature between his fingers and bitterly continued the glaring contest as its legs wiggled.

“Right, yes, thank you, Martin,” he said, hoping to get this done quickly so he could go back to dealing with his unruly lunch. “You can leave them on the table and let yourself out.”

“That doesn’t answer the question- and, Jon, you look like you’ve been running track. I heard- I heard some yelling, in here? Are you alright?”

Jon felt a pang as he realized that Martin had heard and finally met his gaze. Gertrude admonishing him for swearing where people could hear came to mind, although those were much terser moments and weren’t accompanied by hot chocolate in hand or any look of… fearful concern…

Collecting his voice, Jon said, “I’m fine, but ah, you should get yourself accustomed to hearing a bit of yelling and noises of the sort. I was trying to wrangle this runaway statement.” He turned to face Martin and nodded down to his hands as he said it. Martin followed his gaze. “You can leave if you wish. I’ve been told seeing someone eat one of these is almost as unpleasant as actually doing the eating.”

“That’s a spider,” said Martin.

“Yes, Martin, very observant. Now if you could please…?”

Martin kept his gaze on the thing, “It’s just- are you  _ sure  _ you need to eat it? You said you think it’s unpleasant anyway-“

“ _ Absolutely sure _ ,” he said and levelled Martin with as serious a look as he could muster.  _ I’d never put you at risk like that _ , he thought, not able to really find the words to say out loud.

Martin seemed to be taken aback a bit by the response. “I- I know it’s one of your statement... things, but, it’s just a particularly large spider, right? I’m sure if we let it-“

“ _ Martin,”  _ he interrupted again, “There is no such thing as  _ just  _ a spider. You went through the statement. You know what it did. And even if it weren’t evil, why on earth would you concern yourself over what happens to a spider?”

“Look, they’re not as bad as everyone says, okay! I just think they’re neat, and good for the ecosystem, and they help eat pests, like bugs!”

More than a little baffled, Jon just stared. Martin looked back, seemingly waiting for something, and he eventually cleared his throat. Eventually Martin said, “Look, I’m sorry that I pried into what you eat, okay? I’ll leave it! I’ll leave it.”

Jon felt like whatever mental processes were trying to help him work out what to say, he wasn’t privy to them. Trying to figure out how to speak at the best of times wasn’t an easy feat, much less with someone who was, well. Normal.

“I, uh, got you some hot chocolate early…! So you could. Pair that up with the, uh. The spider…”

“Martin,” Jon finally said, looking towards his captured prey and back at him, “You might’ve noticed that I…  _ also _ eat pests.” 

Martin gave him a confused look for a moment, before going, “Oh! You don’t have t- um. I appreciate it?”

“And bugs! I’ve eaten bugs.” 

Martin blinked at him, eyebrows slowly rising. “Right…”

Jon chose to ignore that look Martin was giving him as he finished, “So we’re agreed that I’ll suffice for Web and bug control and that I can eat this spider!”

“I- I mean I guess?”

“Good.” Jon was perhaps a bit undeservedly proud of himself for clearing up Martin’s apparent affinity for spiders, and honestly he was getting antsy about still having it clenched in his palms. Turning his back to Martin, he quickly skewered it and shoved it into his mouth, using the hot chocolate Martin provided to chase down the taste of protein and acute arachnophobia after making sure it was sufficiently chewed through.

“Hmm. There’s a soft taste of rot underneath all the strings- those worms might be more trouble than we thought. I’d say he had a close call with those, but, considering what ended up happening to him he might’ve actually gotten it  _ worse _ .” Grimacing, he started gathering up the loose papers of the case file that had become a bit of a mess. “Poor man. This does spell a lead to possible advancements from the Corruption, though, and that’s… worrying.”

Fitting, he supposed, for the Corruption rituals having to be dealt with in small spurts. For one to be cropping up so close to the Stranger’s Unknowing plans… God, he hated that Gertrude had left him high and dry with no more old hands on deck for this.

Not to mention whatever game the Spider was playing with them. The entirety of the Fear certainly knew how to get on his nerves- the feeling of being tied up in a task he had no control over choosing was all too familiar to him, as was the minefield of manipulation that was dealing with avatars. He wasn’t sure if something about working for the Fears drove people to be as self-servingly smug about it as physically possible, or if it was because the sort that were self-servingly smug were just the type to choose it in the first place.

He was quickly pulled out of his own thoughts by Martin going, “I- if you’re worried about something in his flat, maybe I could go over and- and check for something more? It’s not that far from my flat, and-“

_ “NO.”  _ Jon felt the panic flare up in his chest as if it were fire. He reached out to grab Martin by the shoulders. “Under no circumstances are you to approach that flat or anywhere near it, especially not alone. Am I absolutely clear on this?”

Martin mirrored his panic, seizing underneath his touch. “I was just suggesting! W-Why?”

“Obviously because it’s dangerous!”

“Jon, I know it’s dangerous! That isn’t a straight answer and you know it.”

Jon heaved a sigh. “Timothy Hodge. The worm woman statement. You remember that?”

Martin nodded.

“I can tell it’s the same kind of thing that got into Mr. Vittery’s flat. It was in the taste of it- Martin, you’ve heard what they did and I have  _ personally  _ seen what an infection of that sort looks like. I’d rather not have to same happen to you.”

“O-oh. Okay, wait- does this mean you’ll be trying to go look around there?”

Jon thought for a moment. “It isn’t likely to harbor any new leads, and anything involving the Spider is frankly not something I’d ever want to approach. Look, Martin, I said I’d try to not run into danger. Can I please have some confirmation that you’ll do the same? I can’t have you die. Not for me.”

“I…” Martin seemed to be staring even more alertly at Jon, now. “Yeah. I can do that.”

“Thank you, Martin.” And with that, he let Martin get back to work, breathing a little heavily even when his office door clicked shut.

* * *

“God, we should’ve gotten Martin on board sooner,” Sasha said as she thumbed through the surplus of strange and honestly somewhat worrying items nestled in the hiding spots pointed out to them. “I guess a little fussing really lets you get around.”

“Might want to hurry up on that, Sash,” replied Tim. “We don’t know how long the boss is gonna be eating for.”

Right on cue, a string of curses as colorful as Jon’s casual wear came stumbling from his office, along with several thuds of what sounded like a person hitting the wall. Sasha tilted her head. “I think he won’t be for a while.”

Maybe Tim’s theory of a hundred-year-old Jon wasn’t that far off. Still though, Sasha still held out for the music tastes and social media being indicators for a much younger age.

That, and the stack of children’s scrawling she now held in her hands.

First off, among them were some other of the notes Martin had lost, possibly missed when he’d searched around for it. There were enough doodles that they blended in with the rest of the old drawings found. A few cows with oddly familiar and biologically improbable horns (likely practice for something that was definitely not a cow), some of Tim and Sasha chatting amongst themselves, and a few scattered hearts and the classic surplus of eyes that people always mindlessly drew were gathered in a small pile away from the rest.

She suspected Martin was being a little more attentive to the pages that contained his drawings of Jon. (Sasha had seen them while he was out with Tim on a stakeout. They were very endearing.)

Those weren’t the only drawings there, though. In a different hand and much looser style, to say the least, were several pieces done in ballpoint pen and paint. The pages were slightly more yellowed and the contents much more chaotic.

“You getting the same stuff as I am, Tim?” Sasha asked, looking over her shoulder. 

“Bit more written stuff, I think. And…” Tim held up two glaringly bright old Hawaiian vacation shirts, “Maybe someone’s emergency holiday wear.”

“Well, it certainly looks like his style,” Sasha laughed, “God, the thought of him relaxed enough to be sunning himself on a beach somewhere feels viscerally  _ wrong,  _ somehow.”

Going back to investigating her own finds, Sasha started flipping through her stack of drawings. There seemed to be two distinct styles in the mix: the painted ones and the ones in pen. The painted ones retained rather good form and coherency for a child’s drawing; the ones mostly in ballpoint pen looked quite honestly like something to be put in a torture house that cut up small toddlers in a horror game. She almost wondered if she’d just stumbled upon a part of a very disturbing statement.

The subjects seemed too varied to have all been relevant to a statement, though - there seemed to be copious amounts of Batman fanart in both styles, and several unflattering caricatures of someone labelled Emma in ballpoint pen. Among them there were some that particularly stood out to her, and she reached for her camera to take photos to discuss with Tim. Via text this time, she decided, as some of them seemed to be at once familiar, intriguing and rather ominous, which pointed to something Jon might take notice of.

The first was a lanky, tall figure with shoulder-length hair, drawn in ballpoint. The face followed the trend in the pen drawings of looking more like a marsupial experiencing large amounts of pain than a human, and she would’ve dismissed the thing if it weren’t forcefully crossed out and captioned, "Michael is nothing honest, only knowes lieing”.

_ Sasha: Does this look like the thing with the doors? Called itself Michael? _

_ Tim: Absolutely does not look like it. It did say the name Michael though, and it sorta does sound like its style  _

The next was a lineup of several figures, including the figure from the previous drawing again labelled “Michaell”. Sasha felt a flutter of excitement as she read the other labels, “Emma”, “Fiona”, “Sarah”, “Gertrude” (who Sasha could vaguely parse as a likeness of the woman who’d last held the Head Archivist position, and a final, smallest figure with wings and horns labelled “Me.”

_ Sasha: This is a dragon’s stuff!!! Has to be Jon’s.  _

_ Sasha: Might be just a feeling. _

_ Tim: Uhhhhh I think that’s more than a feeling lol, look at this _

Tim handed Sasha a statement form with frayed edges, written in what was definitely Jon’s hand.

_ Statement of Gerry Keay, transcribed by Jonathan Sims, in hopes of  _ _ summoning the bastard so Gerry can get a few hits in before I eat him mys _ _ learning the whereabouts of Sarah’s book of astronomy. _

_ STUPID IDIOT MOTHERFUCKING JURGEN LEITENER GOD DAMN FOOL BOOK COLLECTING DUST EATING RAT OLD BASTARD SHITHEAD IDIOT AVATAR OF THE WHORE BIGGEST CLOWN IN THE CIRCUS LAUGHED OUT OF TOWN COWBOY MOTHERFUCKING JURGEIN LEITNER- _

The look on Tim’s face when Sasha finished skimming through it and finally looked up could only be described as an unhinged euphoria. She felt her phone buzz.

_ Tim: We found Gerry! Looks like the boss can hold one HELL of a grudge,,, and it isn’t limited to just Elias _

_ Sasha: It says it’s transcribed, there might be tapes of it _

_ Sasha: Tapes might’ve come first. _

_ Tim: Sasha we have GOT to find those tapes _

_ Tim: Sasha I have a mighty need. _

_ Tim: Sasha. _

_ Sasha: cool it buster, we have to get through this before Jon realises _

_ Tim: :( _

_ Tim: Oh yeah, more about Gerry _

_ Tim: D’you think these are Jon’s drawings? _

_ Tim: If we could somehow to get him to give police sketch artistry a try… _

The paper Tim handed to her seemed to be more of a map than a drawing. The two storey layout of Pinhole Books, marked out with hiding places and points for potential break-ins. A red path in the store was drawn in, labelled “MARY” and attached to a number of timestamps. On the other side of the paper was a list.

_ LEITNERS _

_ Book of Astronomy-? Dictionnaire- ?  _ _ Ex Altiora- MC  _ _ Animal bones-MK Skin book-MK  _ _ The Travels-? Mr Spider-MK  _ _ Solomon-? DIG-AS Seven Lamps-? _

_ Sasha: save up a copy of the list labelled Leitners. I think I recognise some of the titles. _

_ Tim: You think this could be some code for a hit list on the guy in the other statement? They REALLY dont like him _

_ Sasha: I have other theories- actually if you want something like a hit list wait till you see this one _

She handed the last of her pieces to Tim, a painted birthday card addressed from “Gerry” to Jon with a message of well wishes attached to a rather colourful depiction of a man in a suit with his eyes gouged out. The poor doodled victim lay splayed across the floor with both his eyeballs neatly scooped out and resting on a plate nearby. Contrary to the previous scrawlings, there was a disturbingly impressive level of detail and skill put into it. Sasha wasn’t sure if less detail would’ve been better or worse.

Tim seemed to just manage to avoid making a sound, his own eyes widened in disbelief and mouth opening as if to say something before closing again.

_ Tim: One wicked sense of humor these guys have, huh _

_ Sasha: If you want to call it that… _

_ Tim: um ?? hello?? what do you mean ‘if I want to call it that’ _

_ Sasha: okay so now miiiiight be a tough time to bring up that Elias told me two of Gertrude’s last assistants were taken out by. Arson.  _

_ [Tim is typing…] _

_ Tim: ARSON. Arson! Okay! Sasha why the blooming hell didn’t you bring this up when Martin told us he threatened to burn Elias alive _

_ Sasha: I didn’t want to say it OUT LOUD, You think Martin would’ve reacted,,, not like he usually does?  _

_ Tim: God, the firing thing _

_ Sasha: Look, we have Elias’ word on this, and…  _

_ [Sasha sent a message link. It is an old newspaper clipping about the death of Emma Harvey.] _

_ Sasha: That. It looks pretty goddamn old, though, and we know how Elias can be with information about Jon, if he was actually the type to do it, don’t you think something more would’ve happened by now? _

_ Tim: something like two cooked up former assistants? _

_ [Sasha is typing…] _

_ Tim:... He said he didn’t want to lose us.  _

_ Tim: *Jon said _

_ Sasha: Right. Least we don’t have to worry so soon about the firing mess. Martin probably never did _

_ Tim: God, MARTIN _

_ Tim: We have to tell him what we found, right? As sweet as it is to watch him falling hard on his arse for him, if he gets hurt... _

_ Sasha: Are you sure? Telling him that we’ve been snooping around in Jon’s things? Genuinely asking, how much do you bet on him not taking this immediately to Jon? _

_ Tim: I think we gotta have some faith in him, might be better to bring this up before he’s made up his mind _

_ [Sasha is typing] _

“Well hello...”

The sudden voice made Sasha and Tim both jump. Something icy dreadfully shrieked up Sasha’s spine as she recognised the door that had appeared on the ground between her and Tim.

“What  _ delights _ have you here…?” The being known as Michael languidly laid its arms on the floor and rested (or skewered? It was hard to tell) its head on its palm not unlike a giggly teenager at a sleepover, its tone altogether far too casually amiable for Sasha’s comfort.

Tim had already shot himself away from where he was sat and was holding up a large pair of scissors. As though that would be enough against the literal knife hands of the being.

“What- what do you want here… Michael?”

Sasha wasn’t sure where she saw it, but perhaps from the tilt of its head and static that its gaze seemed to bring into the air, she feared that it found the name... less than comfortable.

“I  _ was _ coming to visit our dear little, ah, spitfire,” Michael said, reaching for the pile of Tim’s findings that he’d left unattended, “but he seemed to be a bit preoccupied with his latest catch… and  _ this _ is  _ quite  _ a curious find.”

Michael then started cutting out bits of the drawings with its too-sharp fingers, humming lightly to itself and carelessly tossing the pieces behind it like confetti.

(It didn’t fall like confetti, though. If anything it looked like the gravity right under where the door had opened was tilted along with it, falling straight onto the floor of the downward-stretching corridor behind.)

Sasha wasn’t about to touch it for the life of her, but she did hold out a hand in protest. “That belongs to the archives. Why would you want-”

“On the contrary, I think you’ll find the Archive isn’t much in the business of owning anything at all at the moment, really,” it smiled at her, and for a moment she could swear it had the dimensions of the ballpoint pen drawing emerging from beneath the frame of its facial structure. “And I want this because I have more of a vested interest in the wishgranter that, despite everything, she  _ does  _ still seem to own.”

Tim crossed the room, attempting to pull Sasha back. “Jon? You’re talking about Jon.”

Sasha continued, “ _ Who _ exactly are you saying he belongs to? And vested interest or not, you’re showing it by… shredding up his belongings…? What’s this about the archive not owning anyth-”

“Aren’t you chatty, assistant,” the creature said, a bit more testily, then seemed to give pause. “Maybe an Archive might yet still live after _ her _ death. This  _ is… exciting.” _

“What in hell are you talking ab-” Tim’s retort was cut short by the door opened onto the ground slamming shut and pushing Michael in with it, along with part of the pile of papers and the two shirts they’d found.

Sasha reached out to steady Tim as he fell backwards, and when she looked back there was nothing but smooth, solid ground between their piles. For once she found herself hoping that Jon had been able to catch wind of whatever had just happened.

“What. The HELL was that,” Tim asked to the general room.

His question was met with a stretch of silence before Sasha responded. “You were probably right.” She said with a sigh. “We should tell Martin.”

* * *

“Wishgranter.”

Jon tore his attention from his records of Gertrude’s many throwaway phones, screwed his eyes shut, and turned his face towards the ceiling. The day’s search for methods of contacting her that hadn’t already been exhausted over the previous few weeks had left him mostly at a loss and the arrival of the Distortion probably wasn’t any good news.

“Feeling a bit disoriented _ ,  _ are we?”

“I  _ told you  _ to keep aw-“ his remark was cut short when he actually got a good look and realised that it was sporting a horrifyingly familiar Hawaiian shirt. Jon let out a proper groan. “Where did you get that.”

“Where it was left, of course,” It smiled its cheek-cutting smile and leaned like a man on stilts about to topple as it answered, stretching the material of the shirt into dimensions it probably wasn’t ever going to recover from. Picture of innocence. Jon felt a headache coming on already.

“How did- forget it. Why are you here? I distinctly remember telling you about finding Gertrude.” 

“Just stepping in to get a good chat before you have an Archivist dictating your own will to you, of course.” It curved its torso into a crescent and languidly rested its chin on the nearest shelf. “ I’m sure you’ve swiftly found her after months of failed searching because of a little urgent tick in your mind that told you to hurry on with it.”

Jon huffed. “I’m still  _ working on it, fine _ .” He ran a hand over his own face, hoping the texture of his scales across his cheek would rub the tiredness out of him. “What’s this all about? Offering to disclose her whereabouts in exchange for another go at seeing if I’ll digest?”

“Hmm, the Archivist’s whereabouts, what a curious question…” It tapped the shelf it was resting against. “Do you like the assistants under you, Wishgranter?” 

That definitely jolted him to attention. He felt his spine ridges standing on end and tried not to hiss, instead quickly spitting out, “You know my stance on trading with human lives. Again, I’m not repeating her mistakes, so if you’re asking to be paid in a meal-“

“Because they do seem a lovely bunch and I’d hate to see them rot before I have a chance to properly make the successors’ acquaintances.”

Jon paused at that. Deflated. He never knew what to make of the bitter softness that came into his lungs whenever Michael brought up the subject of being friends. Whatever they were to each other at this stage, it was filtered through so many “wait but”s and “fair enough”s that he couldn’t make out the shape of it. He definitely didn’t trust it, but if trust was the prerequisite of an amicable relationship he’d have ended up extremely isolated a long time ago already. 

“Haven’t you yet? I assumed stealing Tim’s soup from the archives made you familiar enough.” 

The Distortion pressed and splayed its fingers against its chest in mock offence. “You heard and let me do it, you know.” 

“I wanted to see if it would still be to your taste after Becoming...” Jon made a vague gesture in Michael’s direction to indicate…it. “What the hell is your point here?” 

“The brood of the Crawling Rot are making their play again, I’m sure you’ve heard. And with your Archivist out of your reach, I just thought you might want the chance to give your assistants a backdoor to make it out.” 

Ah, so that was what it wanted. For Jon to  _ gamble  _ with their lives instead of trade with them. Good to know. “We have a back door. It’s called the tunnels.” 

“You would leave your archives to be destroyed as you lead them out?” It prodded.

“You seem incredibly certain they’ll be here at all for it. And between letting them be lost in the tunnels and letting them be lost in you, I’d rather take a chance on the tunnels where I can hear them, thank you.” 

“Suit yourself... my mistake for forgetting that you aren’t allowed to make your own call. I suppose you can’t See how the moment will come.” 

Jon thought it was odd, come to think of it, that the Distortion would offer this help prior to the event instead of springing it on them in the moment when they wouldn’t have as much time to think about it, or when whether or not they trusted it wouldn’t really matter. “That’s not my job.” 

“No... it seems strange though, that you’re still so reluctant to let your assistants come through me. It Knows You is an enemy of us both! Are they even really yours when they serve it as long as they are bound?” It laid a hand on Jon’s wing. Too lightly, he thought, the sharp edges of his fingers almost grazing him, like tickling claws. He didn’t move to bat it off. 

“Then again,” it continued, “I suppose it would be unbecoming of you to ever let resources go. Forbidden as such from an act that would be incredibly foolish in the eyes of Gertrude Robinson.” 

_ This again.  _ “You keep saying that- why are you so insistent that I don’t make decisions outside of her will? I know how much you hate what she did to you- why do you want to think my actions are always going to be the same?” He glanced at the hand still on his wing, then looked up to face the creature. 

“Why else would you have not said a word about the nature of the world to your caretaker ‘til what she did to me came to pass?” 

The softness in his lungs turned inward on him in an instant.  _ If I’d told him anyway, maybe he could’ve-  _ Jon cut off his train of thought and stepped away from the Distortion, which gave what could’ve been a shrug if it was its shoulders moving up instead of the rest of it folding down. 

“Seemed indicative of how you are, that she could speak the trembling out of your wings and made  _ you _ out of a child that seemed to only want to read. She knew what she created. So will I.” 

“That…” he tried to search for a response, but the only thing he could really think to that was that it talking like this  _ now,  _ seemingly content to point out that he was wished up for her instead of talking him against her to sow some sort of discord, was strangely off. This wasn’t the usual game. “That didn’t seem to be the case when I met a statement of you the first time.” 

“Times have changed, Wishgranter. Times  _ are _ changing.” 

There was a long, tense pause before he looked away from it. “You really don’t think I’ll ever be able to find her, do you. Gerry wasn’t enough…  _ you _ weren’t enough…” Sighing, he wiped away his scales back into skin and resolved to get back to searching. “You’ve got my answer. Now unless you’re going to help or attack me, I’ve got an Archivist to find.” 

It was doing the voice-throwing thing again when he threw another look at it. It wasn’t even there.

“You’ll find an Archivist soon, I’m sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super glad to be getting back to a more regular update schedule, though it's probably gonna take a bit longer between chapters to accommodate everything!! See y'all next month, and we hope you enjoy <3


	8. Stranger, Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Melanie King and the web table enter the picture on the same morning; Michael claims it wants to save its family; Tim is finding it exhausting being the one with the strongest self-preservation.
> 
> Sasha will be marked by the Corruption.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs  
> \- lying  
> \- copious amounts of blood  
> \- very mild mention of body horror  
> \- being skinned alive

It had been two full weeks since Jon had seen the Distortion. Before, when he didn’t have the three extra bodies around the Archives, this wasn’t all that uncommon; especially since Gertrude had had the tendency to breeze through whenever she liked and since Michael never liked being in the same room as her, after its Becoming. Point of fact, the longest Jon had gone without seeing Michael was five months, in between which he and Gerry had finished up several long overseas trips.

But much like how a spider was more terrifying anytime one lost sight of it so too was Jon beginning to regard the absence of Michael. Even to the point of thinking about it now, unprompted, looking again at the words on the page saying that against all logic, Sarah Baldwin was somehow still around.

Or at least her skin was.

“... So,” Jon’s thoughts were interrupted with Melanie clearing her throat, looking impatient, “how’s it all looking, then? You read it all?”

_ “Yes,  _ I read it,” Jon said, somewhat cross with being interrupted. But it couldn’t be helped. “It’s not a particularly long statement.”

“Yeah, well. Sorry for not taking the time to make it pretty,” Melanie rolled her eyes, leaning both her elbows on the desk in front of her, “So? What are your thoughts then?”

“My thoughts,” said Jon, straightening the papers out, “are that you’re lucky you weren’t noticed.”

That seemed to get the “”ghost hunter’s”” attention, at least. There was a bit less of an attitude when she said, “So you believe me.”

“It’s hard to see how you’d fake it,” Jon’s nose wrinkled a bit, “This statement  _ reeks  _ of blood.”

Melanie’s eyebrows furrowed at that. “... I just wrote that… now.”

“Not the paper itself- the apparition you saw.” Jon clarified, “To a lesser extent, Sarah Baldwin herself-”

“If that’s her in the first place,” Melanie interrupted, lip twisting. 

Jon let out a breath, “You catch on quickly.”

“Yeah, well. You notice things in this line of work. There’s plenty of weird shit out there.” 

Jon gave a short, admittedly derisive laugh at that, because. Come on now. ‘This line of work’. It was quite the melodramatic way of explaining the job of entertaining mostly bored teenagers on the internet. “Right, right- all in a day’s work.”

Melanie’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s so funny, exactly? Last I checked you don’t have much room to talk, being some supernatural pencil pusher here.”

God did Jon wish he was just a pencil pusher in times like these. “Yes, well, pardon me if I’m not quite convinced about the observational skills of some You Tuber when it comes to the supernatural.”

“We’re not  _ just  _ youtubers _ \-  _ we’re paranormal investigators!” Melanie huffed, tapping her fingers against the wood for emphasis, “The show’s just a way to get revenue; even if we play it up a bit, add a little  _ pizzazz,  _ doesn’t mean the investigations we do aren’t real, honest phenomena.”

“And then you go inspire your audience to go trespassing over whatever vaguely mysterious plot of land they find and get themselves tangled up in something they end up coming to  _ me  _ about,” Jon bit out, frowning heavily, “I am well aware, Miss King, about what playing it up does-”

“Hey, we make it clear that we’re professionals! Our fans aren’t going out scouring London for spooks that aren’t there.”

“Well, I still don’t want to deal with them when they come.”

“And even if it  _ were  _ happening, who’s fault is it that you work here?” spat out Melanie, and Jon made a face. “You work for an Institute that takes whatever delusional asshole with a made up story off the street in the first place-”

“- and yet we’re the ones who actually believe you, and not any of your investigator colleagues.” Jon finished. That, at least shut her up for a second. “Funny how that works out.”

“...” Melanie slumped a bit in her seat, scowling, “You are one insufferable bastard.”

“I’ve been told a few times before, so I am aware. Thank you.” Jon said and then moved on, “And you say you still have the video?”

“Yeah, I do- it’s pretty badly corrupted, though.” Melanie said, sliding a flash drive forward.

“I can see about cleaning it up- I’d like to confirm some things on my end. But first, if you don’t mind waiting for a moment?” Jon got up, paging through one of the higher stacks of files on his desk until he found the Anglerfish file. The text of the statement itself was harmless by this point, thankfully- but it was the research within that he was more interested in.

Pulling out the page with Sarah Baldwin’s picture on it, he slid it across the table. “Does the Sarah you videotaped look like this?”

Melanie took the paper and glanced over it, eyes widening minutely. “She went missing?” 

“Eight years ago, yes,” Jon said, sitting back down, “and her case is part of a larger case I’m looking over now- do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

“Well, shit,” Melanie said with a gleam in her eye that Jon wasn’t very much liking. It looked like she wanted to Know things; wasn’t having one person in the Archives wanting to throw herself into investigations enough? “Yeah. Yeah, you can- this is actually a  _ lot  _ more than I was expecting, to be honest.” 

“I’m very thorough with my work,” Jon said dismissively, “Now, as for the work Sarah Baldwin’s been doing in the ghost hunting community- do you know who she might have worked with before, other than Georgie Barker?” 

“It’d be hard to track down specific shows she worked with,” Melanie said, “She was pretty insistent on not being credited anywhere- said the pay was enough fame for her. Georgie would probably know a little more than me, since she networked with a pretty good amount of sound engineers when she was getting her podcast off the ground-” Melanie backtracked, “...You know what a podcast is, right? It’s like these modern types of-”

_ “I know what a podcast is,”  _ Jon said acidically. 

“Geez, alright,” Melanie said, “It’s just, with your aesthetic…”

“What is with people being weird about my clothes?” Jon muttered.

“- anyway. I can call Georgie about it.” 

“Yes. Do that.” Jon rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses, “And do you know what Baldwin had worked with Georgie on?”

“Something like-” Three short, hesitant knocks interrupted whatever Melanie was about to say. Melanie glanced behind her before looking back to Jon, an eyebrow raised. “You gonna get that?” 

Jon sighed, calling, “Come in, Martin.” 

The door opened and Martin poked his head in, seeming oddly more flustered than usual. “Hey, so- hm. I can come back later, if you’re occupied,”

“You may as well just say it now,” Jon said, a bit annoyed, “Make it so that this interruption isn’t for nothing.”

“It’s just, well. Were you expecting a delivery?” Martin fidgeted with the sleeve of his sweater, “A couple of blokes just dropped some stuff off- said it was an express deal…” 

That got Jon’s attention. He sat up, focusing on Martin, “What did they bring?”

“A pretty big table with this weird kind of, webby design?” Martin said, crossing the room. He eyed Melanie with some suspicion, which was understandable- in their line of work (which was actually work) it was a good idea to be wary of strangers. Martin, as always, was proving to be an excellent assistant. Martin set a lighter with a web etched into it in front of Jon, “And then this lighter.”

“Hm,” Jon said, fingers weaving together as he stared at the lighter. It was definitely cursed with something- something that seemed dormant, but something nonetheless. And then, Jon’s brain caught up with the table. Eyes widening, his head snapped up to Martin. “A table? And did you look at it? For how long?”

“...? Not very long at all?” Martin said, blinking, “One of the deliverymen- er, I couldn’t really catch his name, but he was kind of a biggish guy? I think he was pretending to be cockney- he, uh, told me to sign some stuff, so I kind of, wanted to get that done with.”

“Right,” Jon said, looking over Martin again. It didn’t sound like he was alone with the table (Though the Stranger’s delivery men were hardly going to make a difference), or was around it long enough for the thing Dekker had chained to it to reach out to him, but still… Jon would have to do a little test. Just in case. Turning to Melanie, he said, “Would you come back sometime tomorrow to continue this? It appears as though there’s a bit of an urgent matter that needs my attention.”

“Sure- I’ll call Georgie tonight and see if I can figure out where Baldwin’s been working,” Melanie said.

“Good to hear. In the meantime, I’ll send this video to our research department for the time being.” Jon said, “I trust you know where the exit is.”

“Yeah- do you have my contact info?”

“Yes. Now if you please…” 

“Alright, alright,” Melanie said, getting up, “At this point I think you’re just trying to get rid of me.”

“I am. See you tomorrow.” Jon said. He tactfully did not retaliate to the muttered  _ prick  _ he got in answer and waited for Melanie to leave the room. Martin started to also move, but Jon said, “Wait. Stay there.” as he started fishing out one of the tape recorders. “I need you to do something for me.” 

“Oh. Sure thing,” 

Discreetly sliding his claws and fangs into place, just in case, Jon slipped a tape into the machine. “Please repeat what you say on this tape.”

“... Why?” Martin asked, looking lost.

“I need to make sure you’re still Martin and that you haven’t been replaced by a monster,” Jon said. “I’d hate to have to eat you.”

“Wait wait- what?” Martin said, looking absolutely incredulous, “Where on earth is  _ this  _ coming from then-?”

“Just repeat.” 

**MARTIN**

I mean!! I don’t know! Why would they just keep these around? Seems like a weird thing to keep, is all.

Martin repeated it. Lo and behold, the voices were a match. 

Jon sighed with some measure of relief as he shut the recording off and set the recorder off to the side, retracting his claws. “You’re certainly Martin Blackwood. Good to know.”

“Yeah, I could have told you that much,” Martin said, eyebrows furrowing, “Now would you mind explaining?”

“Oh, right- I suspect the table to be one that currently has a changeling trapped inside,” Jon explained, straightening out his papers. “From the notes given to my predecessor, its power has been greatly reduced while bound to it, but it’s likely that it’s still able to… take people. After taking their skin it places themselves in their lives and rewrites the memories of all those around it.”

“That…” Martin paused, looking down at the desk before looking back at Jon, “is a  _ lot  _ to just dump on someone, you know that.”

“I know, but I’d also rather not have you going in blind either.” Jon said, “So you should also know that even if someone is replaced, the original voice is still recorded on analog tapes like these. Annoying as they are to deal with…” 

“And if we want to get them back?” Martin asked.

Jon let out a breath and said grimly, “We can’t.”

“...” Martin bit his lip, then looked to Jon, asking, “Do you mind if I take a few tapes, then? There’s a couple with everyone’s voices…”

“By all means. Get some to Tim and Sasha, as well.” Jon smiled despite himself. It was good to see Martin already thinking ahead. And really, all the previous month had shown Jon was that Martin was incredibly dependable, likely in ways that Elias hadn’t ever taken account. If he absolutely had to have assistants, he could have gotten worse than the three that had been sent. 

It also helped that Martin didn’t seem inclined to investigate more than what was needed for a thorough job. Not an Eye-inclined impulse in sight. “... You worked in the library for ten years before this, correct?”

“Yeah?”

“How would you feel about helping me reorganize the Archives?”

* * *

“Is your boss always that stuffy?” 

“Oh, you have no idea- the Boss man’s got an iron rule over-” 

Sasha glanced at where Tim was chatting with the statement giver who had come in that day, gathering up what papers she could find. It wasn’t much, but they were getting somewhere, now that they’d been able to say for certain that Gerry and Jon had been in Italy at the time of Andrea Nunis’ statement. The transcript was still sitting beside her keyboard, reading

_ One was pale, scrawny almost, and looked utterly out of place. His loose, bright shirt was in stark contrast to his long, black hair. The other was a dark-skinned man sitting beside him, wearing a matching shirt further matched by some tacky gold chains on his horns. He looked at me angrily, like I’d just told him I’d killed his mother or something. The human, though, was staring at me in a way I found uncomfortable.  _

_ I mean, I know I’m not unattractive and I’m used to creepy guys staring at me sometimes- and sometimes they’ve got a wingman with them, or their dragon, like this guy did- but this was different. He was staring at me with an air of concentration. Like he was trying to read something written very small on my forehead. He ducked his head and started whispering to the dragon with him. Both of them started muttering to each other like that, each one occasionally stealing glances at me, and I realized pretty quickly that they were trying to figure out which one was coming over.  _

_ After about a minute of this, he left the table, leaving the dragon to go back to staring at me. The pale man took the seat opposite of me and sat down. He had gone back to staring at me, and it became clear that I was going to have to start the conversation. So I asked him who the hell they were and what they wanted.  _

_ He ignored the first question completely and said, in English, that what he and his cousin wanted was to have a nice holiday in peace… _

It was a shame that it led to Gerard Keay’s death certificate. 

And after all of the trouble Sasha went through to hack into foreign databases, too…

Sasha sighed, tuning back into the conversation Tim was having. She caught the tail end of Tim asking, “There’s gotta be a lot of interesting people in the business, yeah?”

“Oh, definitely- right now I’m actually working with a friend of mine. Georgie Barker,” Melanie said, “She is absolutely  _ brilliant  _ with how she’s set up her show- and she’s got a damn nice eye for video editing too,”

“Georgie Barker?” Sasha perked up, “As in, the creator of  _ What the Ghost  _ Georgie Barker?”

“Yeah, the same,” Melanie said, looking over at her with a proud little smile. 

“I’m a huge fan!” Sasha lied, “She does the best narration I’ve ever heard- I could listen all day! Oh, but that’s not too weird to say, is it…?”

“Not at all- she’d appreciate it, I think,” Melanie laughed a bit.

“Me and Sasha listen together, actually!” Tim also lied, grinning excitedly, “God, the Ancient Ram’s Inn episode…” Tim gave an exaggerated shiver, wrapping his arms around himself, “Still gives me  _ shivers-  _ had to have Sasha hold me through that one,”

“Only because  _ someone  _ gets squeamish when it comes to Devil Worship happenings,” Sasha retorted. 

“And you work at the Magnus Institute?” Melanie raised an eyebrow, smiling.

“Hey, what can I say! I like the research aspect,” Tim shrugged, “It’s not so scary, when it’s all on paper.”

“True- and same on the research aspect,” Melanie said, leaning her arms on the partition between Martin’s empty desk and the rest of the desks, “Georgie does an amazing amount of research on stuff- she’s actually the one who referred me here. Told me to ask for Jon.” Melanie snorted, “Guess I should’ve listened when she said he was an asshole.”

“Oh? I didn’t know Jon knew  _ Georgie Barker-  _ boss man is holding out on us!” Tim said smilingly. 

“Yep,” Melanie said, popping the ‘p’ at the end. She lowered her voice, “They even used to be dating.”

“What? No way,” Sasha covered her mouth, feigning shock.

Tim similarly pretended to be shocked, “You’re lying! Jonathan “stuffy Grandma in the body of a youngin” Sims, dating a podcaster? I can’t  _ believe  _ it,”

Melanie said, “I almost can’t either, after meeting him, but hey- it was all over the internet for a while. They were  _ the  _ indie couple. And, y’know. Hard to miss a pair of dragons in the spotlight.”

“At least they seem to get on even after the break up,” Sasha smiled.

“Oh, no, they haven’t spoken in years.” 

Tim and Sasha looked at each other. “Really?” Tim asked, acting surprised, “Why do you reckon that is?”

“Don’t know- it’s not really my story to tell,” Melanie shrugged, “But hell, Georgie’s a lot more preoccupied nowadays…” 

And that was how they learned that absolutely no one who had been close to Jon could be asked about what the hell was going on.

Sasha continued to feign interest in the conversation as she stole more of the files on her desk, slipping them into her purse while Melanie was looking the other direction. It was cut mercifully short when Jon shooed everyone out, claiming that they needed to take their break while he handled something outside the Archives, but Sasha could only find it in herself to feel contempt for the man who wouldn't give up his fucking secrets.

* * *

_ I heard Alf cry out from further down the corridor. He sounded pissed, cursing up a storm about a ‘stupid kid’, and I started on towards him again. I saw lights from up ahead, and was about to call out when Gerard came running back out of the darkness.  _

_ He was clutching a book in his hands, and clearly wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. He barrelled right into me, knocking me to the floor again. He was only a skinny kid, but he was so strong, and kept his footing, running on ahead of me. Alf wasn’t all that far behind, reaching a hand out to try and grab the back of the kid’s shirt. The second it looked like Alf was going to reach him was when the passage ahead was set on fire. _

_ Alf tried to call for Gerard, but the kid didn’t slow down for even a second. He ran straight into the fire, book clutched to his chest as the flames licked up his arms. That was the bizarre part of it all- none of it seemed to actually hurt the kid. He ran through the heart of an inferno completely unscathed, disappearing into the red depths of it, and the fire disappeared just as soon as it had arrived. We were left alone in the empty… _

In the end, Harold Silvana’s statement just told them information they already knew.

Their movements were already restricted while in-office with Jon suddenly taking a more active role in organizing the Archives. The leads were running up dry with the death of Gerard Keay and the discovery that Georgie had apparently broken with Jon years ago. Dominic Swain, upon hearing the name of the Magnus Institute, had sworn at them and blocked both their cells. This was all getting to be a bleeding torture. Sitting on a park bench in the middle of a mostly empty park on a cloudy day wasn’t doing much to alleviate that.

Slapping the Silvana file on the park bench beside him, Tim decided, “I’m done for today.”

Sasha clucked sympathetically, not looking up from her phone as she asked, “Is this about the fact that you’ll never see the Robert Smirke stone?”

_ “Yes _ this is about the fact that I will never see the Robert Smirke stone.” Tim rolled his eyes, leaning back against the park bench. “Also it’s about the fact that we’re kind of up against a brick wall, to a lesser extent.”

“Mm.” Sasha said in a tone of voice that said she agreed but also really would rather not like to be. Her other arm was casually slung over the back of the park bench. If that casual position just so happened to mean that Sasha was, by proxy, slinging an arm around Tim at the same time, that was probably just a coincidence. A coincidence that Tim did not need to think any deeper on because they’d had their time in the romantic limelight already and, wow, would you look at how that’d turned out.

Tim continued, “We should ask him about paid vacations. We could probably weasel a paid vacation out of Jon.” 

“Go yourself,” Sasha said, finally letting the phone fall screen-first into her lap, “Things are getting  _ much  _ too interesting here.”

“‘Interesting’,” Here Tim made little air quotes, “is just another word for ‘impossible’.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow, “When’s the last time you picked up a thesaurus?”

“I’m too hot to need one. That’s not the point,” Tim turned his body to face hers more, catching her amused look, “The point is we have a cold case on our hands which doesn’t seem to be getting hotter no matter how long we sit on it.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Sasha asked.

Tim replied, “I’m suggesting a spa day, effective immediately. Face masks, full body massages, the works. Just ditch the rest of the day and roll up to the nearest parlor, no overthinking, just action.”

“We don’t make enough money for that,” Sasha said.

“We can fix that,” Tim said only vaguely menacingly.

“We could go to lunch instead?” 

“Yeah probably,” 

So they went out to lunch.

It’d been a bit, since they’d been able to sit down to have a conversation not consumed with talk of the Archives. It wasn’t for lack of trying and it wasn’t as if they didn’t have normal smalltalk anymore; Sasha was still trying to get him to watch House MD, and was more than willing to listen to Tim ramble about The Great British Bake Off, and they talked about things beyond that. But everything eventually circled back around to research.

Tim resolved not to think about anything related to Jon or whatever secrets he was hoarding while looking at the Starbucks menu. This would have been an easy resolution to stick to, had the single empty table in said Starbucks not been occupied by the fucking Distortion, looking expectantly at both he and Sasha.

It wasn’t like the thing was even all that out of place. He was still tall and still had an obnoxious amount of hair, but beyond that, he looked like any other guy. Maybe that was why the way his pupils rattled inside of his irises made Tim’s teeth set on edge.

Michael waved at them with a mittened hand. Tim just barely stopped himself from making a face. 

Tim whispered to Sasha, “It’s still warm enough to get to-”

“We should talk to it.” Sasha said decisively.

“What? No!” Tim said, “That is the exact opposite of what you do when you see a monster! You don’t go toward the thing that can kill you!” 

Sasha plucked her drink out of Tim’s hands and ignored Tim completely, saying, “This might be the breakthrough we need.”

“Sasha! Sasha wait-” Tim tried to call as quietly as he could, trying not to make a scene in the Starbucks. When Sasha sat down across from the Distortion, Tim groaned, ran his free hand through his hair, and stalked over to sit beside her. Bound by both social convention and by Sasha’s terrible sense of self-preservation. What a life.

“Hello, Assistants,” Michael greeted warmly with a very human smile, “I have been waiting for our double date.”

“Wouldn’t that mean you'd have to have someone else with you though?” asked Sasha. 

Michael laughed the tinny kind of laugh that skittered out of old radio speakers with old-timey American accents worming under his skin as he said, “Yes and no. My date is right here.” The creature gestured to the window it was sitting beside and the reflection in the glass seemed to turn its head, lines growing thicker.

“So it’s just you,” Tim said, already feeling tired.

“So is there someone else in the glass?” Sasha asked.

Michael laughed again and didn’t answer. His coffee swirled with little candied spirals and steam, catching the air with dizzying shapes. Sasha asked again, “Why are we having this date, Michael?”

“Because you are doing what I expect you to, Assistant Archivist.” Michael said.

“Which is?”

“Asking questions,” Michael tilted his head, “Wouldn’t you agree that dates are a good time for questions? Michael thought so, once.”

“Anything we have to ask wouldn’t be the first date type of question,” Tim said.

“And yet you have asked me whether I have kids.” Michael smiled, his reflection giggling with the frequency of a siren honking. “If you are not careful, Assistant, I might believe you’re flirting with me.”

“Do you flirt, though?” Sasha asked, her coffee untouched, “Does something like you even do that? What are you?” 

Michael laughed again, quiet-loud in the corner of Tim’s ear as he asked, “How would a melody describe itself if asked?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Perhaps not.” 

Silence passed between the three of them and Tim sipped at his overly sugary drink, not even sure what to say to anything. He really didn’t want to be here. He had pepper spray in his back pocket, sure, and a pocket knife, but there was no telling if any human self-defense would have an effect if this thing ever went on the attack.

“What do you want?” Sasha asked.

“To help.” said the Distortion. It looked at Tim and said, “I gave you your goulash, Assistant.”

“Why?” Tim asked, not buying it for a single second. 

“Because you left it in the Archives,” 

“I mean, why do you want to  _ help.”  _

Michael didn’t laugh this time, thankfully. Merely tilted his head at an angle that made the skin on his neck twist like folding fabric. “The Wishgranter would like you to have help.” 

“Did Jon put you up to this?” Sasha asked and Tim tensed in turn.

“No- the Wishgranter does not know I have talked to you.” Michael said, giggling, “It is not his job to know things. It is his job to grant a wish. Hence, he is the Wishgranter.”

“What’s your relation to him?” Sasha asked before Tim could even formulate a response to that, “Because you make it sound as though you both know each other. And you must have  _ some  _ agreement- you let him use your Door.”

“Assistant Tim knows already.” Michael said, smiling at him in a way that made it feel like his spine was being chalked up, “It was the first question he ever asked me.”

“What…” Tim already felt the intensity of Sasha’s gaze on him. A shiver ran up his spine and he thought that this entire interaction could not, in any way, be good for his health. He thought back to his first interaction with the creature and his eyebrows furrowed. “The thing about… kids?”

“Michael took care of two children.” said the Distortion. 

“And one of them was Jon,” Sasha said, “meaning he was raised, in part, by a monster.”

The amusement in its eyes made Tim’s bones want to liquefy into his bloodstream. “Do you care about the Wishgranter, Assistant?”

“Why do you ask?” Sasha asked.

“Would you like to know how to save his life?” 

“...” Tim took a breath, “Save his life from what?” 

“There is a crawling rot that writhes across the land,” said the Distortion. Its reflection stared at Tim, thick clear lines being made in the fogged up window. “A flesh hive which you Assistants have been kept unaware of. The Wishgranter wishes to solve this problem himself- and it will cost him his skin, if not worse.”

Tim’s throat suddenly went dry. Swallowing around a shot of caramel flavoring, he said, “You’re the ‘throat of delusion incarnate’.”

“I am.” Michael confirmed. “It is my nature to lie.”

“Then how do we know you’re even telling the truth?” 

Michael continued to smile. “How indeed?”

There was silence. Sasha looked to the window, then back to the Distortion, with both Michaels’ leering grins reflecting each other. 

Tapping the lid of her coffee, she began to list off things they’d discovered thus far. “So far, you haven’t done anything actively harmful to Jon that we know of. We know Jon trusts you enough to be able to use your power- or else trusts that you won’t hurt him. We know there was a Michael mentioned in the art Jon had done in the past, and that he speaks to versions of you that his magic creates, seeking advice… We know, at least, that you’re telling the truth about your relationship.”

“But Jon’s also been in this supernatural business longer than we have,” Tim said warningly, “and it doesn’t make sense to get us involved. Especially since we don’t have the closest relationship with the guy- that would be Martin and, apparently, you. Even if you’re trying to help him in this weird, roundabout way, we wouldn’t be much help.” 

“I will be waiting at Hanwell Cemetery,” Michael said, “Will you come meet me?”

“Yes.” Sasha said.

“No.” Tim said at the same time.

“Oh dear,” said Michael insincerely, with a grin that said he was very much enjoying this, “Do not fight over me. I simply would not know what to do with myself.”

“We’re not fighting-” Sasha started to say.

Tim looked to her, eyebrows furrowing, “No, no we are definitely fighting on this. Did I just suffer a momentary stroke or did you just say you want to  _ follow  _ the scary knife monster that just admitted to being the literal embodiment of lies?”

“Tim, seriously,” Sasha said, “it’s not as though I trust this or anything-”

“That gives you even less reason to go!” 

“-but he’s still the best lead we have in figuring out what’s going on,” Sasha continued stubbornly, “and it might look good, if we know how to help Jon.”

“Or! We could look like a pair of idiots,” Tim said, “needlessly throwing ourselves into danger even though Jon might know what’s going on already.”

“Or we could gather information that Jon doesn’t have,”

“Or we could be led into a literal death trap,”

Sasha spat, “Or we could learn something that Jon isn’t telling us and protect  _ ourselves,”  _

_ “Or  _ we could at least put faith in Jon to warn us beforehand, or at least throw us out the Archives before he does something life-threatening, instead of gambling on the Lying Monster which,” Tim gestured for emphasis, “is the embodiment of lies and does nothing but the lies!” 

“But I gave you goulash,” Michael interjected somewhat petulantly. 

Tim felt like he had seven headaches at once. “What does that have to do with  _ anything?” _

“I gave it to you,” Michael said, as if talking to a child, “because friends give each other peace offerings. I also gave you that phone number, too- even though I do not like the Falling Titan or that man.” 

“The Falling Titan?” Sasha questioned.

Michael tilted his head, grinning, “Did you not see the statements I had left for you?”

“... Which ones?” 

Michael only laughed in response, but the message was pretty clear, It wasn’t going to tell them how much of their investigation had been guided by the information only it appeared to have. Sasha looked to Tim, waiting for him to take the lead on responding, and Tim looked at the window to find the reflected Michael seeming expectant as well. 

“...” Tim didn’t really have much choice but to fold. Sasha might have gone on alone anyway, and the thought of that just made his stomach hurt. “... I’m texting Martin that we’re doing an investigation. He’ll call the police if we’re not back in three hours.”

“That is fine by me- it is very important for you to be safe,” said Michael.

“And Jon?” Sasha asked Tim, “Should we wait on letting him know?”

“I am sure,” Michael said, smiling, “that the Wishgranter will be just fine.”

Michael’s smile wasn’t nearly as unsettling as the fact that his reflection began to weep.

* * *

He couldn’t see his own hands. Too much blood. He had too much blood. 

And how was he supposed to know that taking even a centimeter off the table to eat would break the seal? That man- the one with the faith, the one who bound it, the one who'd known the wisher, the one he couldn't remember the name of- never mentioned it was fragile like this.

He’d stopped breathing after watching himself drag himself out Artefact Storage, adjusting skin. But he still had skin, and iron teeth, and horns, and claws. He had too much blood. It was spilling everywhere and he had too much of it. It was slowing him down something fierce. It didn’t help that he wasn’t breathing.

But then he was breathing again, and there was still too much blood. It couldn’t take his claws. It couldn’t take his wings. There would be holes, then, in its back- flayed pieces of not-human peeking through. 

He had to go underneath. He should have been dead because there was too much blood. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t dead. He was just skinned and he  **wasn’t dead.**

He retreated, leaving only the blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy has this been !!! a fun chapter, both to write and just plan out in general. The wheels are set in motion for next time! We hope you enjoyed, and thank you as always for your wonderful comments and kudos!!


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